Tech

Google's greenhouse gas emissions increase 48% in five years

Cooling pipes at a Google data center in Douglas County, Georgia.

Google's greenhouse gas emissions have soared 48% over the past five years due to the expansion of data centers that support its artificial intelligence systems, casting doubt on the company's pledge to be net-zero by 2030.

Google said in its annual environmental report on Tuesday that the Silicon Valley company's pollution will reach 14.3 million tonnes of carbon equivalent in 2023, up 48% from its 2019 baseline and up 13% from last year.

Google said the spike highlights the challenge of reducing emissions while investing in building large-scale language models and related applications and infrastructure, and acknowledged that the future environmental impacts of AI are complex and hard to predict.

Chief Sustainability Officer Kate Brandt said the company remains committed to reaching its 2030 goal, but stressed that it is an extremely ambitious one.

“We expect emissions to continue to increase until we see emissions decline towards our target,” Brandt said.

She added that Google is working hard to reduce its emissions, including by signing clean energy deals, and Brandt said there are big opportunities for AI-enabled climate change solutions.

As major tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft announce plans to invest tens of billions of dollars in AI, climate experts have expressed concern about the impact these power-hungry tools and systems will have on the environment.

In May, Microsoft acknowledged that its emissions had increased by nearly a third since 2020, largely due to data center construction, but Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates also argued last week that AI can help drive climate action.

Meanwhile, constraints on energy production and transmission are already posing challenges for companies looking to build new technologies: Bernstein analysts predicted in June that AI could double the growth rate of electricity demand in the U.S., causing total consumption to exceed current supply over the next two years.

Google said in its report on Tuesday that energy-related emissions in 2023, mainly due to electricity consumption by its data centers, rose 37% from the previous year and overall accounted for a quarter of the company's greenhouse gas emissions.

Emissions from Google's supply chain accounted for the largest share of its total emissions at 75%, which also increased by 8%. Google said its emissions would continue to rise in the near future as part of building out the infrastructure needed to run its AI systems.

Google has committed to achieving net-zero direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and to running every hour of every day on carbon-free energy within each grid it operates by that date.

But the company warned in a report on Tuesday that the end of some clean energy projects in 2023 has reduced the amount of renewable energy available.

Meanwhile, the company's data center electricity consumption was outpacing Google's ability to bring more clean power projects online in the United States and Asia Pacific.

The company estimates that Google's data center electricity consumption will grow 17% in 2023, reaching about 7% to 10% of global data center electricity consumption. Google also said its data centers consumed 17% more water in 2023 than the previous year.

Sources

1/ https://Google.com/

2/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/googles-greenhouse-gas-emissions-jump-48-in-five-years/

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