Google's emissions have increased 48% in 5 years because of AI

(Bloomberg) — Google's carbon emissions have risen by nearly half in five years, according to a new environmental report, as the company embeds artificial intelligence into many of its flagship products, making it harder to meet its goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2030.

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The annual report was released on Tuesday and covers Google's progress towards meeting its environmental goals over the last year. The Alphabet Inc. subsidiary said its greenhouse gas emissions will reach 14.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent through 2023. That's 48% higher than in 2019 and 13% higher than in 2022, the company said. Google blamed the increase on increased energy consumption in its data centers and emissions from its supply chain, and said its push to incorporate AI into its products could make it more difficult to reduce emissions going forward.

Google said in the report that further integrating AI into its products could make it harder to reduce emissions due to increased energy demand from the centralization of AI computing, as well as emissions from expected increases in investments in technology infrastructure.

The Mountain View, California-based company has said for several years that it plans to eliminate such emissions from its operations by 2030.

As a recent Bloomberg News investigation shows, AI, especially generative AI that takes user input and generates new content like text, images, or songs, is incredibly resource-intensive. As the technology grows rapidly, more and more data centers will be needed to build and run it, causing electricity demands to skyrocket.

The dramatic increase in electricity demand caused by Silicon Valley's growth-at-all-costs approach to AI threatens to upend national energy transition plans and the trillion-dollar tech companies' clean-energy goals. Some countries, including Saudi Arabia, Ireland and Malaysia, will need more energy to run all the data centers they plan to build at full capacity than their renewable energy supplies can provide, according to a Bloomberg analysis of the latest available data.

Google isn't the first big tech company to point out that the rapid growth of AI is an obstacle to reaching environmental goals: Microsoft said in May that its carbon emissions have increased by 30% since 2020 as it ramped up its investments in AI. That increase makes the company's goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2030 even more challenging than it was when it announced its carbon-negative goal.

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Sasha Luccioni, climate director at startup Hugging Face, said the data shows tech companies didn't anticipate the rapid growth of AI when they set their environmental goals. How could they, he said? Google's report uses 2019 as its base year, and they certainly didn't anticipate the rapid growth of AI. Companies were surprised by both how much energy it takes to build these technologies and how much energy it takes to operate them, Luccioni said.

Listen to Zero: Microsoft aims to be carbon negative, then pivots to AI

–With assistance from Dina Bass.

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