Beyond Tomorrow: AI Ads, Googles Carbon Emissions Balloon, Apple Joins OpenAI Board — Weekly AI Roundup

Every year Google releases their environmental report, in which they describe what they’re doing to reach their net-zero emissions goal. This year’s report doesn’t exactly paint a rosy picture of the Silicon Valley giant’s lofty aim.

To put it into context: Google plans to achieve net-zero emissions across all its operations by 2030, with 2019 as the base year. Some would say that is a reasonable goal.

However, the company reported that it had seen a 13% year-on-year increase in green house gas emissions in 2023. Just last year, the tech giant’s operations produced pollution equivalent to 14.3 metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution. And it gets worse.

Google’s green house gas emissions have grown 48% since 2019.

The company has attributed the increases to “data centre energy consumption and supply chain emissions.” In non-corporate speak, Google’s AI push isn’t doing any favours for the government. Data centres use a massive amount of electricity and generate a ton of emissions. Training AI just makes those costs go up even more. The Verge has a great breakdown of how much elecricity does AI consume.

The company itself has admitted this in the report, saying:

“As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands from the greater intensity of AI compute, and the emissions associated with the expected increases in our technical infrastructure investment.”

Without condoning Google, these sort of emissions are inevitable, given how the tech industry as a whole is trying to reach the as-yet undefined finishline for AI.

To be fair, it’s not like the company isn’t trying either. In their report they’ve outline several strategies they’ve either undertaken already, or that are in process to make their business carbon energy free.

Some of these include optimising their data centres to be more energy efficient, as well as finding sources of carbon-free energy across the Americas and the Asia Pacific region.

Google isn’t alone in this, Microsoft is also struggling to keep pace with its climate goals. The Bill Gates-founded company has its own climate goals, with its own annual sustainability report. With a 2020 baseline, Microsoft has found that its emissions since that year are up 29.1%.