Google’s Carbon Emissions Surge Amid AI Energy Demand

Google’s Greenhouse gas or GHG emissions increased 13 percent year-over-year in 2023, and the growth was nearly 50 percent compared to 2019 amid the skyrocketing energy demand related to artificial intelligence or AI, as per its 2024 environmental report.

The search engine giant, which is aiming to achieve net-zero emissions by 2030, attributed the significant growth in emissions primarily to increased data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions.

According to the firm, the growth in total GHG emissions highlight the challenge of reducing emissions while compute intensity increases and it grows technical infrastructure investment to support the AI transition.

As per the report, the company’s total data center electricity consumption grew 17 percent in 2023, despite maintaining a 100 percent global renewable energy match.

Google said, “As Google’s infrastructure continues to power the digital transition, providing numerous economic benefits across the globe, we expect this trend to continue in the future. But we see our growing infrastructure as an opportunity to drive the innovations and investments needed to power a low-carbon economy.”

Google’s data center consumption of more than 24 TWh in 2023 translates to around 7 percent to 10 percent of global data center electricity consumption and approximately 0.1 percent of global electricity demand.

A Google-owned and -operated data center is, on average, around 1.8 times as energy efficient as a typical enterprise data center, it said.

The company further said it maintained a global average of around 64 percent carbon-free energy across its data centers and offices to 2023 from 2022, despite growth in electricity demand over this period.

According to Google, “While we advanced clean energy on many of the grids where we operate, there are still some hard-to-decarbonize regions like Asia Pacific where CFE isn’t readily available. In addition, we often see longer lead times between initial investments and construction of clean energy projects and the resulting GHG reductions from them.”

In the report, Google added that it is committed to developing AI responsibly by working to address its environmental footprint through model optimization, efficient infrastructure, and emissions reductions.

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