As Google has rushed to incorporate artificial intelligence into its core products — with sometimes less-than-stellar results — a problem has been brewing behind the scenes: the systems needed to power its AI tools have vastly increased the company’s greenhouse gas emissions. AI systems need lots of computers to make them work. The data centers needed to run them, essentially warehouses full of powerful computing equipment, suck up tons of energy to process data and manage the heat all of those computers produce. The end result has been that Google’s greenhouse gas emissions have soared 48% since 2019, according to the tech giant’s annual environment report. The tech giant blamed that growth mainly on “increased data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions.” Now, Google is calling its goal to reach net-zero emissions by 2030 “extremely ambitious,” and said the pledge is likely to be affected by “the uncertainty around the future environmental impact of AI, which is complex and difficult to predict.” In other words: a sustainability push by the company — which once included the slogan “don’t be evil” in its code of conduct — has gotten more complicated thanks to AI. Google, like other tech rivals, has gone all-in on investing in AI, which is widely seen as the next major tech revolution that’s poised to change how we live, work and consume information. The company has integrated its Gemini generative AI technology into some of its core products, including Search and Google Assistant, and CEO Sundar Pichai has called Google an “AI-first company.” But AI comes with a major downside: the power-hungry data centers that Google and other Big Tech rivals are currently spending tens of billions of dollars each quarter to expand in order to fuel their AI ambitions.
Full story : Google’s greenhouse gas emissions are soaring thanks to AI.
