Apple’s AI Ambitions Leave Big Questions Over Its Climate Goals

“A year ago, when they were talking about Apple Intelligence, it struck me how they were doing an ‘all of the above,’ right? They had their own thing but they could fall back onto ChatGPT,” says Ben Lee, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the department of electrical and systems engineering, who has previously consulted for Meta and Google on sustainability.

“That suggests that they’re not quite sure that the smaller models give them what they want on device,” he says. “I think they’re trying to develop the capability first and foremost and then trying to figure out efficiency later.”

The path to developing more advanced AI capabilities hasn’t exactly been smooth, with key features painfully delayed and next-gen Siri pushed further and further back—with the upgrade now not expected until spring 2026. Recent Bloomberg reporting suggests that Apple leadership is weighing a move to OpenAI or Anthropic technology to help finally deliver its AI promises for a new version of Siri, with tests of these outside models on Apple’s cloud infrastructure. The question is: Will Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environment, policy, and social initiatives, be at that table when these decisions are made?

Even if she is, there is no getting away from the electricity needed to manufacture the advanced semiconductor chips powering on-device Apple Intelligence (like the A18 and A18 Pro chips) and Apple’s own AI servers (reportedly Apple’s M4 chips as of this year). “Taiwan doesn’t have such a rapid deployment of renewable energy, and South Korea, another place that fabricates a lot of chips, doesn’t have a lot of it at all,” says Lee.

In March, TSMC—the Taiwan-based semiconductor chipmaker which powers flagship iPhones—put out a 2024 report, including a section on ESG: There was a 19 percent increase in greenhouse gas emissions per product unit versus its target of a 10 percent decrease. There was also a 14 percent increase in water use and, drumroll please, only around 14 percent of its used energy came from renewables.

The TSMC press team, when asked for comment, pointed to TSMC accelerating its renewable energy timeline by 10 years in 2023, a 20-year joint procurement agreement for 20,000 gigawatt-hours of renewable energy, and its partnership with Apple on the Restore Fund for carbon-removal projects.

But Greenpeace’s Lena Chang wants to see TSMC investing more into Taiwan’s wind, solar, and geothermal energy industries, following Google’s lead there. “The majority of TSMC’s renewable energy is purchased,” she says. “They can take the initiative to invest more. From a passive consumer to a proactive prosumer, that’s what we are trying to call out TSMC to do more.”

An iPhone Afterlife

Of course one of the trickiest threads to solve in all of this is the incompatibility of building AI-capable chips for iPhones which are used on average for just two and a half years before a customer upgrades to a new device.

“Unlike data centers, which buy hardware and then deploy them for very long lifetimes and get very high utilization, you don’t get that in the consumer electronics side,” says Lee. “Apple would like us to refresh our hardware every two years or so. So that’s the difficulty. You have the Scope 3 emissions numbers [for the supply chain], then very high refresh rates and relatively poor utilization.”