Google’s frank AI admission highlights climate challenge facing tech industry

• Google has released its environmental report for 2024. 
• Greenhouse gas emissions are up almost 50% compared to 2019. 
• Energy demand of data centres for AI systems cited as a major factor. 

Google’s greenhouse gas emissions soared by almost 50% over the last five years, according to its annual environmental report. The tech giant has put the 48% increase down, in large part, to the electricity required to run data centres for its artificial intelligence (AI) push. 

Users may have noticed more AI integration into search this year, while the Alphabet Inc owned company is also developing its own generative chatbot - Gemini, the artist formerly known as Bard. Despite contributing to an increase in its own climate emissions, Google claims that AI has the potential to help mitigate 5–10% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2030. 

Google itself has the aim of becoming “net zero” by 2030, however its latest environmental report raises concerns that the ambition may be in doubt. The company admitted "as we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging”. 

BBC reports that generative AI systems - such as Gemini or ChatGPT - may use around 33 times more energy in order to function. The high electricity demand is due to the Large Language Models (LLM) at the heart of popular artificial intelligence tools. 

If you are wondering why energy requirements for LLMs are so taxing, it is because vast computational resources are needed in order to run them. As a result, current AI systems lead “to significant energy use and corresponding carbon emissions”, writes the Scale Down substack.  

In the report, Google revealed a large disparity between the environmental impacts of its data centres across the globe. Sites in North America and Europe, for example, mostly sourced its power from carbon-free sources, while data centres in the Middle East, Asia and Australia were on the other end of the spectrum. 

However Google stated that overall about two-thirds of its energy use is carbon-free. The company adds: “We know that scaling AI and using it to accelerate climate action is just as crucial as addressing the environmental impact associated with it.” 

For more on how AI could be used to help fight climate change, Sims Witherspoon from Google’s artificial intelligence research lab DeepMind recently did a TedTalk on the subject. It is 12 minutes and can be watched via YouTube here.