Despite the company’s climate goals, Google’s greenhouse gas emissions are on the rise thanks to AI.
Google’s greenhouse gas emissions have ballooned, according to the company’s latest environmental report, showing how much harder it’ll be for the company to meet its climate goals as it prioritizes AI.
Google has a goal of cutting its planet-heating pollution in half by 2030 compared to a 2019 baseline. But its total greenhouse gas emissions have actually grown by 48 percent since 2019. Last year alone, it produced 14.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution — a 13 percent year-over-year increase from the year before and roughly equivalent to the amount of CO2 that 38 gas-fired power plants might release annually.
The jump in planet-heating pollution primarily comes from data center energy use and supply chain emissions, according to Google’s environmental report. Data centers are notoriously energy-hungry — those used to train AI even more so. Electricity consumption, mostly from data centers, added nearly a million metric tons of pollution to the company’s carbon footprint in 2023 and represents the biggest source of Google’s additional emissions last year.
Full report: https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2024-environmental-report.pdf
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/2/24190874/google-ai-climate-change-carbon-emissions-rise
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Datacenter energy consumption is a serious concern now that big tech is ramping up AI, which seriously impact climate change. This report puts some numbers on what’s happening behind the doors of one of the biggest hyperscalers.
These are very staggering numbers:
> “As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands from the greater intensity of AI compute, and the emissions associated with the expected increases in our technical infrastructure investment,” the report says. Google’s data center electricity consumption alone grew by 17 percent in 2023, a “trend” it expects to continue in the future, according to the report. Already, Google estimates that its data centers accounted for up to 10 percent of global data center electricity consumption in 2023.