Observability and Actions to See what AI really costs — in dollars and impact, Connected to sustainability services for ROI – Return on Investment + Impact
Every AI query has a price tag most people never see: tokens spent, dollars charged, and the electricity, water, and emissions emitted — behind the scenes. That footprint is invisible to most people generating it by using AI services, which means it's invisible to their decisions that could reduce it.
We've built and are improving codename Stardust, a free, open-source operating system and SDK that puts those numbers back in front of you. Today it runs as a browser extension alongside the AI chat apps people already use, including Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, and as software kits that developers add to their own AI applications. For teams running AI at scale, it plugs into the monitoring tools they already use through OpenTelemetry. Wherever a decision gets made, the same figures appear: tokens, cost, energy, water, and carbon, per prompt or per workload.
One glance gives you a compact score; one click shows the full breakdown in plain language. Every figure is labeled as measured or estimated, and our methods are published openly, so anyone can check our work and help improve it.
This is AIforE's ROI in practice: return on investment and return on impact. Stardust helps people and companies capture AI's real upside (productivity, speed, quality of life) while giving them what they need to right-size how they use it.
The browser extension and SDK are the subscriber side. The other side is the provider: any service that removes carbon or restores ecology. Like a printer driver, a provider implements one standard interface once and becomes available to every subscriber, with no custom integration on either side.
Providers are not limited to carbon. Carbon removal (reforestation, blue carbon, direct air capture, biochar) joins renewable energy generators, water restoration and recycling projects, heat recovery operators, and materials recyclers, all through the same interface. Each is matched to subscribers like for like, by the kind of impact it offsets, and every service has to be carbon negative or otherwise positive for Earth's ecology, in harmony with AI.
A data-center operator can be both: a subscriber consuming electricity and water, and a provider exporting waste heat, generating on-site solar, or recycling water. One SDK covers both roles, and a benefit sold to others is never also counted against the operator's own footprint.
At the center is Stardust Core. It measures a client's footprint across carbon, electricity, water, heat, and materials, matches it with the providers that can address each one, and connects to the exchanges and registries where credits for each are issued, traded, and retired. The value flowing through those markets, including recycling, helps offset the cost of sustainable operations.
Stardust never mints its own credits. Recognized programs verify and issue them; Stardust supplies the measurement data and retires credits in the client's name.
Removal and avoidance credits from registries such as Verra, Gold Standard, ACR, and CAR, with Puro.earth for engineered removals.
Energy attribute certificates: RECs, EU Guarantees of Origin, and I-RECs, plus hourly granular certificates (EnergyTag) as they come online.
Water restoration certificates (BEF, one certificate per 1,000 gallons) and volumetric water benefit accounting, matched within the same or a stressed watershed.
Waste heat delivered for reuse in district heating, greenhouses, or industry, measured with ISO/IEC 30134-6 and credited where white-certificate or carbon programs apply.
Plastic credits (Verra) and e-waste recovery attested by certified recyclers (R2, e-Stewards). There is no mature e-waste credit market yet.
Like for like. A water credit never cancels carbon, and a renewable energy certificate is an electricity claim, not a carbon offset.
One benefit, one claim. Each credit is retired once, for one beneficiary and one claim period.
Match in time and place. Electricity is matched within a market boundary and, where possible, by the hour; water within the same or a stressed watershed; heat to a named local recipient.
Show the confidence. Every provider carries a confidence tier, so a verified registry credit is never presented the same way as an unverified attestation.
This is built in the open as Project Stardust, and the measurement standard behind it is AIforE's contribution to the field: one open schema for the negative and positive impact of computing, mapped to existing standards rather than competing with them. Many registries don't yet offer open write APIs, so early connectors will retire credits through an account holder and move to automation as registries support it.
Finishing the core plug-in and shipping it free and open source, so any developer or company can build on it.
Portability work across Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Firefox, and integration at the cloud/infrastructure level.
Keeping it free forever for individual users — sustainability tools shouldn't sit behind a paywall.
Every dollar here moves a working, open-source tool closer to release — one that puts sustainability data directly in the hands of the people using AI every day.
AIforE is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit organization. EIN: 42-2272946. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.