Janice R. Andrews
Over the past five years, Google’s greenhouse gas emissions have increased by almost 50%, mostly due to the energy requirements of its artificial intelligence (AI) operations. Tuesday’s release of the company’s 2024 Environmental Report features a considerable increase. As a component of Google’s yearly transparency initiatives, the study highlights the difficulties the internet company confronts in achieving carbon neutrality by 2030.
Growing Energy Use and Emissions
In 2023, Google released 14.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to the research. This amount is a 13 percent increase from the prior year and a 48 percent increase from 2019. The corporation mainly blames increasing emissions from the supply chain and higher energy use of its data centers for this jump. Reducing emissions is made more difficult by the energy needed to power these cutting-edge technologies as AI is incorporated more deeply into Google’s product line.
“This result is primarily due to increases in data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions,” according to the research. “As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands associated with the expected increases in our technical infrastructure investment.”
The Effects of AI on the Environment
The research from Google clarifies the wider effects of the AI growth on the environment. AI model creation and implementation demand a significant amount of energy, both for training and for continuous model operation. According to research by Carnegie Mellon University and AI firm Hugging Face, creating a single image with AI can use as much energy as charging a smartphone.
Analysts for the industry are also raising concerns about the possible burden on energy supplies. Analysts at Bernstein predict that during the next two years, the United States’ demand for power may increase at a rate twice as fast due to the expansion of AI, possibly overtaking the available supply. Other digital behemoths like Microsoft, which revealed a roughly 30 percent increase in greenhouse gas emissions since 2020, primarily as a result of data center building, share this worry.
Needs for Cooling and Water Usage
The more water that Google uses to cool its data centers is another way that the company affects the environment. Google’s data centers used 6.1 billion liters of water in 2023, 17% higher than the year before. To put this in context, the southwestern United States could irrigate about 41 golf courses a year with this amount of water.
The paper emphasizes how this higher water usage is mostly caused by the expanded AI workloads. Even though AI is a powerful and inventive tool, some of its uses have received negative press. For example, Google Search has been known to provide some highly contentious and unrealistic solutions, including eating pebbles and putting glue on pizza to keep the cheese from falling off. Additionally, photos of racially varied Nazis have been produced by Google’s AI-powered chatbot, Gemini, raising ethical and sociological concerns.
The Road to Zero Carbon
Despite these obstacles, Google is nevertheless determined to reach its 2030 carbon neutral target. The research notes that prior to starting to decrease in the direction of their reduction targets, overall greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are anticipated to increase. The business did not, however, specify which actions will result in the predicted decrease in emissions.
“As our business and industry continue to evolve, we expect our total GHG emissions to rise before dropping toward our absolute emissions reduction target,” according to the study. Since AI is a dynamic field, it is difficult to predict how it will affect the environment in the future. Our understanding of past trends may not adequately reflect how AI will develop. The line separating AI tasks from other workloads will become meaningless as we further integrate AI into our whole product line.”
The substantial environmental risks brought about by the quick development and application of AI technology are highlighted in Google’s 2024 Environmental Report. While AI has the potential to revolutionize a number of industries, achieving sustainability goals is becoming more difficult due to its high energy and resource requirements. In order to move towards a sustainable future, Google and other digital firms must strike a balance between innovation and environmental responsibility as this landscape changes.
