AI is driving Google and Microsoft's emissions soar and contributing significantly to climate change

Researcher Jesse Dodge did some quick math on how much energy an AI chatbot consumes.

A single query to ChatGPT uses roughly the same amount of electricity as turning on a single light bulb for about 20 minutes, he says, so when millions of people use something like that every day, it consumes a very large amount of power.

He is a senior research analyst at the Allen Institute for AI, where he studies how artificial intelligence consumes energy. AI consumes much more power to generate answers than traditional internet uses such as search queries and cloud storage. A Goldman Sachs report found that a ChatGPT query requires nearly 10 times the power of a Google search query.

As AI becomes more sophisticated, it will require more energy, and in the United States, most of that energy comes from burning fossil fuels like coal and gas, which are the leading causes of climate change.

Most companies working on AI, including ChatGPT developer OpenAI, don't disclose their emissions. But last week, Google released a new sustainability report that offered a glimpse of the data. Deep inside the 86-page report, Google said its greenhouse gas emissions last year increased 48% since 2019. The company blamed the surge on data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions.

Further integrating AI into products could make it harder to reduce emissions, the report said.

Google declined to be interviewed by NPR.

“Data centers are getting bigger and bigger, eventually culminating in supercomputers.”

Google aims to achieve net-zero emissions by 2030. The company claims that its operations are carbon neutral because it has been purchasing carbon offsets to cover its emissions since 2007.

But Google wrote in its sustainability report that it will no longer “maintain operational carbon neutrality” after 2023. The company says it remains committed to its 2030 net-zero goal.

Dodge says Google's real goal is to build the best AI systems it can, and the company will dedicate huge resources to this, including training them in increasingly large data centers to supercomputers, which consumes huge amounts of electricity and generates huge amounts of carbon dioxide emissions.

Microsoft has gone a step further than Google in its climate pledge, saying it will be carbon negative by 2030. But the company has also faced setbacks because of its focus on AI: In a sustainability report released in May, it said its emissions had increased 29% since 2020 due to increased construction of data centers designed and optimized to support AI workloads.

The infrastructure and power required for these technologies creates new challenges in meeting sustainability commitments across the technology sector, according to the report.

A company spokesman declined to comment further.

AI’s deep hunger for energy

AI requires the computing power of thousands of servers housed in data centers, which in turn require huge amounts of electricity to meet that demand.

Northern Virginia is home to a burgeoning data center industry that, according to The Washington Post, will require enough energy to power six million homes in that corner of the state by 2030.

Increasing demand for electricity across the country has delayed plans to retire several coal-fired power plants, according to a separate report from The Washington Post.

“You have to build an entire physical infrastructure to support AI,” said Alex Hanna, research director at the Distributed AI Institute, who worked on Google's ethical AI team before leaving the company in 2022 over its handling of a research paper that highlighted the environmental costs of AI.

Hanna said the data center boom will continue to grow as long as there are organizations fully committed to AI.

Goldman Sachs looked at the expected growth of data centers in the United States, predicting that by 2030, data centers will consume 8% of the nation's total electricity, up from 3% in 2022. The firm's analysts say the widespread adoption of AI technology, and the data centers needed to supply it, will create a surge in electricity demand the likes of which has not been seen in a generation.

According to Bloomberg, there are now more than 7,000 data centers worldwide, up from 3,600 in 2015. Bloomberg estimates that collectively, these data centers use as much electricity as the entire country of Italy for a year.

An “AI First” World

Every big tech company is going all in on AI. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has called Google an AI-first company. In the past few months, the company released a chatbot called Gemini to the world and added an AI overview tool to Google Search. Facebook parent Meta has added chatbots to several of its products. And Apple last month announced a partnership with OpenAI to bring AI to its digital assistant, Siri.

During their first-quarter earnings calls, these companies all said they were investing billions of dollars in AI.

Google announced $12 billion in capital expenditures in the quarter alone, much of it on data center investments to accelerate its AI efforts, and said it plans to maintain that same level of spending for the full year.

AI researcher Hanna says that without serious intervention, the environmental costs of artificial intelligence will only get worse.

“A lot of people out there talk about existential risk around AI, about rogue entities somehow controlling nuclear weapons or whatever,” Hanna said. “But that's not a real existential risk. We're facing an existential crisis right now. It's called climate change, and AI is clearly making it worse.”

Editor's note: Google and Microsoft are financial supporters of NPR.

Copyright 2024 NPR

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