The AI Ecosystem
at Northeastern
Estimated energy and carbon footprint by tool — based on published inference costs and estimated campus adoption rates. Hover any card to expand details.
Tool-by-Tool Breakdown
Sorted by daily adoption rate · hover a card to see full description
ChatGPT
Writing~15,600 Northeastern community members use this daily
Grammarly
Writing~13,200 Northeastern community members use this daily
GitHub Copilot
Coding~9,600 Northeastern community members use this daily
Claude
Writing / Research~8,400 Northeastern community members use this daily
Google Gemini
Research~6,000 Northeastern community members use this daily
Perplexity
Research~4,800 Northeastern community members use this daily
Midjourney
Image~3,600 Northeastern community members use this daily
Whisper / Speech Tools
Audio~2,400 Northeastern community members use this daily
Estimated Daily Campus CO₂ by Tool
Kilograms of CO₂ generated per day across all estimated users at Northeastern. Accounts for adoption rate, query volume, and per-tool energy intensity.
kg CO₂ / day →
of all campus AI carbon comes from just 3 tools
Midjourney, ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot
The top 3 tools account for 69% of all AI-related carbon at Northeastern. Shifting usage patterns — or negotiating carbon-offset agreements with vendors — could meaningfully reduce this footprint. For example, routing writing tasks toward lower-energy models like Grammarly or Claude (2 Wh/query vs. 20 Wh for image generation) would have an outsized impact.