Google’s emissions increase nearly 50% in five years due to AI’s energy demand

Google’s goal to reduce its climate footprint is in jeopardy as it relies on increasingly power-hungry data centers to power new artificial intelligence products. The tech giant revealed on Tuesday that its greenhouse gas emissions have risen by 48% over the past five years.

Google said data center electricity consumption and supply chain emissions were the main cause of the increase. It also revealed in its annual environmental report that its emissions in 2023 had increased 13% compared to the previous year, reaching 14.3 million metric tons.

The tech company, which has invested heavily in AI, said its “extremely ambitious” goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2030 “will not be easy”. He said the “significant uncertainty” around achieving the target includes “uncertainty about the future environmental impact of AI, which is complex and difficult to predict”.

Google’s emissions have increased by nearly 50% since 2019, the base year for Google’s goal of reaching net zero, which requires the company to remove as much CO₂ as it emits.

The International Energy Agency estimates that the total electricity consumption of data centers could double from 2022 levels to 1,000 TWh (terawatt hours) in 2026, roughly the level of electricity demand in Japan. Artificial intelligence will result in data centers using 4.5% of global energy generation by 2030, according to calculations by research firm SemiAnalysis.

Data centers play a crucial role in training and running models that support AI models like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s GPT-4, which powers the ChatGPT chatbot. Microsoft admitted this year that energy use related to its data centers was jeopardizing its “moonshot” goal of being carbon negative by 2030. Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, admitted in May that “the moon has moved” because of the company’s AI strategy.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said last week that AI would help fight the climate crisis because big tech is “seriously willing” to pay extra to use clean sources of electricity in order to ” say they are using green energy.

Big tech companies have become big buyers of renewable energy in an effort to meet their climate goals.

However, it is committed to reducing CO₂ emissions are now faced with promises to invest heavily in AI products that require significant amounts of energy for training and deployment in data centers, along with the carbon emissions associated with manufacturing and shipping the servers and computer chips used in that process. Water use is another environmental factor in the AI ​​boom, with one study estimating that AI could account for up to 6.6 billion cubic meters of water use by 2027 – nearly two-thirds of England’s annual consumption.