Google’s carbon footprint balloons in its Gemini AI era

Google’s greenhouse gas emissions have soared, according to the company’s latest data environmental reportshowing how much harder it will be for the company to meet its climate goals when prioritizing AI.

Google has a goal of halving planet-warming pollution by 2030, compared to its 2019 baseline. But its total greenhouse gas emissions have increased 48 percent since 2019. In the year alone last year, it produced 14.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution – a 13 percent year-over-year increase over the previous year and roughly equivalent to the amount of CO2 that 38 gas-fired power plants can be released annually.

The jump in planet-warming pollution comes primarily from data center energy use and supply chain emissions, according to Google’s environmental report. Data centers are notoriously power hungry – those used to train AI even more so. Electricity consumption, primarily from data centers, added nearly a million metric tons of pollution to the company’s carbon footprint in 2023 and represents Google’s largest source of additional emissions last year.

“As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increased energy demand due to the greater compute intensity of AI and emissions associated with expected increases in our infrastructure investment. technique”, states the report. Google’s data center electricity consumption alone grew 17% in 2023, a “trend” expected to continue in the future, according to the report. Google already estimates that its data centers will represent up to 10% of global data center electricity consumption in 2023.

To try to minimize environmental impact, Google says it is trying to make its AI models, hardware and data centers more energy efficient. The company also has a goal to run on carbon pollution-free energy 24 hours a day on every electrical grid it connects to by 2030.

Google is not alone when it comes to AI, putting corporate climate goals even further out of reach. Microsoft’s greenhouse gas emissions were about 30% higher in fiscal 2023 than in 2020.