Google's planet-heating pollution output is skyrocketing thanks to a push for bigger and better AI, a trend that is affecting tech giants across the industry despite ambitious climate targets.
What's happening?
NPR broke the news on a sustainability report released by Google, which revealed the company's heat-trapping gas pollution rose in 2023 by 48% in comparison to 2019. This surge was attributed to data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions.
Jesse Dodge, senior research analyst at the Allen Institute for AI, told NPR that Google's real goal is to build the "best AI systems that they can." This comes with an environmental price tag, as these centers rely on "bigger data centers all the way up to supercomputers, which incurs a tremendous amount of electricity consumption and therefore CO2 emissions."
Meanwhile, the publication reported, Microsoft's carbon pollution has grown by 29% since 2020 due to the construction of more data centers to support AI.
Why is this trend concerning?
As the world looks to reduce its dependence on dirty energy, which is driving the overheating of our planet, most data centers in the U.S. are still relying on electricity from coal and gas, according to NPR. Meanwhile, these centers are only expected to suck more and more energy from the grid in the coming years — Goldman Sachs researched the expected growth of data centers in the U.S., and estimates they will be using 8% of the country's power by 2030.
"There [are] a lot of people out there that talk about existential risk around AI, about a rogue thing that somehow gets control of nuclear weapons or whatever," Alex Hanna, the director of research for Distributed AI Research Institute, told NPR. "That's not the real existential risk. We have an existential crisis right now. It's called climate change, and AI is palpably making it worse."
Already, we are feeling the impacts of rising global temperatures, including more extreme and dangerous weather across the planet, as NASA reports. For instance, experts are warning that the 2024 hurricane season could see unusually intense storms. Destructive wildfires have also raged across the globe in 2024, from the Amazon to New Mexico in the United States.
What's being done about rising global temperatures?
Google and Microsoft still hope to slash their share of planet-heating pollution by 2030 — Google has plans to meet net zero by that time, while Microsoft aims for negative emissions, NPR reported. In 2022, Microsoft was the fifth-biggest corporate solar user in the United States, while Google came in at 15th, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. Still, it is unclear how they will reduce the impacts associated with greater data needs.
A number of governments across the world are also striving to reduce their impact. For instance, Tokyo is requiring most new buildings to have solar panels, and a New York law will require all Lyfts and Ubers to be EVs by the year 2030.
You can take action by voting for pro-environment candidates who prioritize climate issues.
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