Google’s carbon emissions have soared by 51% since 2019 as artificial intelligence hampers the tech company’s efforts to go green.
While the corporation has invested in renewable energy and carbon removal technology, it has failed to curb its scope 3 emissions, which are those further down the supply chain, and are in large part influenced by a growth in datacentre capacity required to power artificial intelligence.
The company reported a 27% increase in year-on-year electricity consumption as it struggles to decarbonise as quickly as its energy needs increase.
Datacentres play a crucial role in training and operating the models that underpin AI models such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s GPT-4, which powers the ChatGPT chatbot. The International Energy Agency estimates that datacentres’ total electricity consumption could double from 2022 levels to 1,000TWh (terawatt hours) in 2026, approximately Japan’s level of electricity demand. AI will result in datacentres using 4.5% of global energy generation by 2030, according to calculations by the research firm SemiAnalysis.
Google CO2 emissions were 1.5 MTo in 2010. By 2018 they were 13 MTo. In 2023 they were 14 MTo.
I’m sorry but there’s more to the story that what’s being told in the article. For starters any dataset that takes 2019/2020 as their base line is skewed, we all know what happened that year.
And, on the other hand, Google emissions increased by almost a 1000% in ten years before AI.
Truth is more important than that agenda or the dogma. That article does the wild assumption that a big share of the increase in electricity usage is because AI. It may be, or it may not be, but the article presents zero evidences for that claim. And data in hand we know that google can use a ton of electricity without AI. So the impact of AI may or may not be as big as portrayed by the article. And it also disregards completely the massive increases in google emissions before 2019.