Google's greenhouse gas emissions are soaring because of AI

New York CNN —

As Google rushes to embed artificial intelligence into its core products with disappointing results, problems are brewing behind the scenes: The systems needed to run its AI tools are significantly increasing the company's greenhouse gas emissions.

AI systems require lots of computers to function, and the data centers needed to run them are essentially warehouses full of powerful computing equipment that consume large amounts of energy to process data and manage the heat those computers give off.

As a result, Google's greenhouse gas emissions have soared 48% since 2019, according to the company's annual environmental report. The company attributed the increase primarily to rising energy consumption in its data centers and emissions in its supply chain.

Now, Google has said it has a very ambitious goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2030, a pledge that is likely to be affected by uncertainties about the future environmental impacts of AI, which are complex and hard to predict. In other words, AI has made the company's sustainability efforts, which once included a “don't be evil” mantra in its code of conduct, much more complicated.

Google, like other tech rivals, is committed to investing in AI, which is widely seen as the next big tech revolution that will change how we live, work, and consume information. The company has integrated Gemini-generated AI technology into several of its key products, including Search and Google Assistant, and CEO Sundar Pichai has called Google an AI-first company.

But AI has a big drawback: the power-hungry data centers that Google and other big tech companies are currently spending tens of billions of dollars each quarter to expand to fuel their AI ambitions.

As an example of how much more demanding AI models are than traditional computing systems, the International Energy Agency estimates that a Google search query requires an average of 0.3 watt-hours of power, while a ChatGPT request typically consumes around 2.9 watt-hours of power. An October study by Dutch researcher Alex de Vries estimated that in a worst-case scenario, Google's AI systems could eventually consume the same amount of electricity as Ireland per year, assuming AI is fully deployed on Google's current hardware and software.

As Google integrates more AI into its products, it may find it harder to reduce emissions due to increased energy demand from the centralization of AI computing, as well as emissions from expected increases in investment in technology infrastructure. The company added that data center electricity consumption is currently growing faster than it can bring zero-carbon sources online.

Google said it is considering investing in clean energy sources such as wind and geothermal to power its data centers and expects its total greenhouse gas emissions to continue to rise before falling.

The large amounts of water used as a coolant to keep data centers from overheating also pose a sustainability challenge. Google has said it aims to replenish 120% of the freshwater it consumes in its offices and data centers by 2030. Just 18% of water was replenished last year, up significantly from 6% the year before.

Google is among the companies experimenting with ways to use AI to fight climate change. For example, a 2019 Google DeepMind project trained an AI model using weather forecasts and historical wind turbine data to predict wind power availability, helping make renewable energy sources more valuable to wind farmers. The company is also using AI to suggest more fuel-efficient routes for drivers using Google Maps.

“We know that scaling and leveraging AI to accelerate climate action is just as important as addressing the associated environmental impacts,” Google said in the report.

Sources 1/ https://Google.com/ 2/ https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/03/tech/google-ai-greenhouse-gas-emissions-environmental-impact/index.html The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article

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