Google’s greenhouse gas emissions 13 percent increase 2023 and 48 percent Since 2019, this has clashed with the goal of achieving net zero by the end of the decade.
The main culprit? AI.
“As we further integrate AI into our products, the increased intensity of AI computing could increase energy demands and make it more difficult to reduce emissions,” Google wrote in its annual environmental report.
Microsoft is reducing its emissions 29 percent increase According to the company’s annual sustainability report, released in May, its carbon emissions have doubled since 2020 compared to 2019. The tech giant, which aims to be carbon negative by 2030, similarly cited AI as a cause of rising emissions.
“In 2020, we launched what we called the Carbon Moonshot. And that was before artificial intelligence exploded.” Brad Smith, Vice Chairman and President of Microsofthe told Bloomberg at the time.
“Just looking at our projections for the expansion of AI and its power needs, in many ways the moon is five times further away than it was in 2020,” he added.
AI requires significantly more energy than other processes. A single ChatGPT request consumes 2.9 watt-hours A typical Google search will yield only 0.3 watt-hoursAccording to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Generating an image with AI requires more energy than generating text. On average, generating an image requires 60+ times A study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and AI startup Hugging Face estimates that generating text would require a billion tonnes of energy.
This leads to increased emissions: creating 1,000 images using the popular text image generator tool Stable Diffusion XL generates the same amount of emissions. Average gasoline car gets 4.1 milesAccording to the study:
For more details, see the full report on TheHill.com.
