Google's emissions rose by nearly half in five years as the corporate incorporated artificial intelligence into lots of its core products, making it harder for the tech giant to satisfy its goal of eliminating carbon emissions by 2030, in keeping with a brand new environmental report.
The annual report was released on Tuesday and covers Google's progress in meeting its environmental goals over the past 12 months. The Alphabet Inc. subsidiary said its greenhouse gas emissions would total 14.3 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2023, up 48% from 2019, the corporate said, and 13% from 2022. Google said higher energy use from its data centers and emissions from its supply chain were accountable, and said its push to infuse its products with AI could make it harder to cut back emissions in the long run.
“As we increasingly integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands from the higher intensity of AI computations and emissions associated with the expected increase in our investments in technology infrastructure,” Google wrote within the report.
The Mountain View, California-based company has been announcing for several years that it plans to eliminate such emissions from its operations by 2030.
AI—and particularly generative AI, which processes user input and spits out latest content like text, images or songs—is amazingly resource-intensive, as a recent Bloomberg News investigation showed. As the technology grows rapidly, increasingly more data centers are needed to construct and run it, resulting in rising electricity demands.
Google just isn’t the primary major tech company to cite the rapid growth of AI as an obstacle to meeting its environmental goals. In May, Microsoft Corp. said its carbon emissions had risen 30% since 2020 because it increasingly invested in AI. The increase made the corporate's goal of getting below net-zero emissions by 2030 even tougher to attain than when it announced its carbon-negative goal.
Sasha Luccioni, climate officer at startup Hugging Face Inc., said the info showed that tech firms hadn't anticipated AI's massive growth after they set their environmental goals. “Nor could they have,” she said. “The base year in that Google report was 2019 – it was definitely not anticipated.” Companies were surprised by each how much energy it takes to develop such technology and the way much energy it takes to run it, Luccioni said.
– With support from Dina Bass.
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