AI Sustainability Leaders from Salesforce and Hugging Face Launch Sustainable AI Group to Help Enterprises Reshape AI's Environmental Trajectory

The launch comes at a pivotal moment: AI infrastructure spending is projected to reach $5 trillion by the end of the decade, and the environmental footprint of that buildout has rapidly become a material business and societal concern: cost volatility, grid reliability, supply constraints, regulatory exposure, and reputational risk with employees, communities, and investors. SAIG is launching to give enterprises the research, frameworks, and tools they need to navigate that landscape — and to use the leverage they hold as the largest customers of AI.

Reframing where the leverage actually lies

Most of the conversation about AI sustainability has focused on scaling the supply side: data centers, chips, transmission, the grid. SAIG's founders argue that this framing has created a blind spot — and a missed opportunity — on the demand side, where the enterprises actually buying and deploying AI hold the power to shape what gets built and how.

“The grid is downstream. Enterprise procurement decisions are upstream,” said Boris Gamazaychikov, Co-Founder and CEO of SAIG. “When an organization chooses which AI systems to deploy, which vendors to contract with, and what standards to hold them to, it sends a demand signal that travels back through the entire value chain. Right now, that signal is almost entirely silent on sustainability. Our organization is built to change that.”

“All AI isn’t created equal,” added Dr. Sasha Luccioni, Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer. “A fine-tuned small model and a frontier LLM require vastly different amounts of energy and compute, and a data center connected to a clean grid and one running on gas are worlds apart. There is so much information missing about AI’s environmental impacts that’s vital for AI users, developers and policymakers to make informed decisions with sustainability in mind. That’s the gap we’re working to close.”

Independent voices on the work ahead

"The customer relationship has always been a powerful force in creating change — when your customer asks for something, you respond. Nowhere is the customer voice more important than in the AI industry, and no topic is more critical than climate change. SAIG is building the kind of rigorous, practical work that lets enterprises call for greater climate action from their vendors. When the companies buying and deploying AI at scale demand greater climate ambition with clarity and consistency, it will positively shape the future we all share." — Patrick Flynn, Founder of Switchboard; Former Head of Sustainability, Salesforce.

"Understanding the environmental impacts of AI is one of the more important and underdeveloped areas of research in the field right now. The gap between what we know and what gets translated into the decisions that shape AI's actual footprint — in deployment, in procurement, in policy — has been a persistent challenge. Independent, rigorous work that closes that gap is exactly what this moment requires." — Dr. Priya Donti, Assistant Professor at MIT; Co-Founder and Chair of Climate Change AI

A narrow window of enterprise influence

For most of AI’s commercial history, the industry operated in a growth-at-all-costs phase, largely unresponsive to external pressure on sustainability. That dynamic is shifting fast. AI companies are maturing into genuine revenue dependence on enterprise customers, and the speculative capital that funded the buildout is starting to expect returns. Enterprises — who will represent the majority of that revenue — are entering a window of real influence over how AI gets built, sourced, and powered. SAIG is launching to help them recognize and exercise that influence before the window closes.

What SAIG does

SAIG works with enterprises across three integrated practice areas:

• Research: Rigorous, open studies that examine the fundamental environmental questions surrounding AI, from model inference impacts to data center emissions. Built to ground decisions in evidence, not assumptions.

• Advisory: Translating evidence into strategy for organizations deploying AI, building it, or shaping policy around it. From exploratory workshops to tailored measurement frameworks and procurement guidelines.

• Deployment: Building and supporting the tools, benchmarks, and applied frameworks that make sustainable AI measurable and implementable — such as the AI Energy Score, the first standardized benchmark for measuring AI model energy use co-created by the founders.

Selected work by the founders

Sasha and Boris bring to SAIG a body of foundational work that has shaped how the field measures and acts on AI's environmental impacts:

• AI Energy Score: A standardized benchmarking and labeling initiative that makes the energy performance of AI systems comparable across providers. Co-created by the SAIG founders, it has become a reference point for organizations evaluating AI sustainability claims.

• Research on AI Inference Impacts: Foundational and widely-cited research quantifying the energy and carbon footprint of AI inference.

• Sustainable AI Procurement Guidelines: Practical, enterprise-facing guidance helping organizations build sustainability criteria into their AI vendor evaluations and contracts.

• Power, Heat, and Intelligence: AI Data Centers Explained: An accessible primer demystifying the infrastructure powering modern AI, written for sustainability and procurement leaders without deep technical backgrounds.

About the founders

Dr. Sasha Luccioni, Co-Founder & Chief Scientific Officer, is one of the leading voices on the environmental impacts of AI. She holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Université du Québec à Montréal and completed her postdoctoral research under Yoshua Bengio. Formerly AI & Climate Lead at Hugging Face, she is widely credited with helping define the field of AI environmental impacts, both through foundational research and through her work bringing this issue into mainstream public and scientific discourse. Dr. Luccioni's work has been recognized by TIME Magazine's 100 most influential people in AI and by Business Insider on its AI Power Lists, and her research has been featured in Nature, The Economist, MIT Technology Review, NPR, BBC, Le Monde, and beyond.

Boris Gamazaychikov, Co-Founder & CEO, is the former Head of AI Sustainability at Salesforce, where he built the company's AI sustainability strategy from the ground up. He brings over a decade of experience tackling complex environmental challenges — previously leading decarbonization strategy for some of the world's largest technology companies at Stok, and earlier spearheading the Pentagon's environmental program. Recognized by The Independent's Climate 100 and Business Insider's AI Trailblazers, Boris is a frequent keynote speaker on AI sustainability and an advisor to climate-tech ventures. He holds a degree in Environmental Engineering from the University of Maryland and is a licensed professional engineer.

About Sustainable AI Group

Sustainable AI Group is a research and advisory firm helping enterprises measure, compare, and act on the environmental impacts of AI. Through open research, strategic advisory, and applied tools and benchmarks, SAIG bridges the gap between rigorous science and organizational decision-making — positioning enterprises to drive a more sustainable AI industry.

Media Kit

A complete media kit — including founder headshots, the SAIG logo and brand guidelines, the press release in additional formats — is available here.

Note: headshots must credit photographer Clara Lacasse

Press Contact

Boris Gamazaychikov, Co-Founder & CEO, Sustainable AI Group

boris@sustainableaigroup.com