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Greenhouse gas emissions have skyrocketed, according to Google’s latest data environmental reportshowing how much harder it will be for the company to achieve its climate goals if it puts AI first.
Google aims to halve its planet-warming pollutants by 2030, compared with a 2019 baseline. But its total greenhouse gas emissions are up 48 percent since 2019. Last year alone, it produced 14.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide — a 13 percent year-over-year augment from the year before and about the same as the amount of CO2 that 38 gas power plants may be issued annually.
According to Google’s environmental report, the planet’s pollution surge is primarily due to energy consumption in data centers and supply chain emissions. Data centers are notoriously energy-hungry — those used to train AI are even more so. Electricity consumption, mostly in data centers, added nearly one million metric tons of pollution to the company’s carbon footprint in 2023, and was the largest source of additional Google emissions last year.
“As we continue to integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions could be a challenge”
“As we continue to integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to the increasing energy demands resulting from AI’s higher compute intensity and the emissions associated with our expected increase in technology infrastructure investments,” the report says. Google’s data center electricity consumption alone increased by 17 percent in 2023, a “trend” that the report predicts will continue into the future. Google already estimates that its data centers accounted for up to 10 percent of global data center electricity consumption in 2023.
To minimize its environmental impact, Google says it is trying to make its AI models, hardware, and data centers more energy competent. The company also has goal by 2030, 24/7 carbon-free energy apply in every energy grid it connects to.
Google isn’t alone in AI pushing corporate climate goals even further out of reach. Microsoft’s greenhouse gas emissions were about 30 percent higher in fiscal 2023 than in 2020.