Energy-guzzling AI derails tech firms' climate goals

As major technology companies race to take advantage of the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, the energy-guzzling technology is derailing their efforts to rein in emissions and become carbon neutral or negative. 

Google revealed that its greenhouse gas emissions rose 13 percent in 2023 and 48 percent since 2019, clashing with its goal of becoming net-zero by the end of the decade.

The primary culprit? AI. 

“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,” Google wrote in its annual environmental report.   

Microsoft has seen its emissions jump 29 percent since 2020, according to its annual sustainability report released in May. The tech giant, which aimed to be carbon negative by 2030, similarly cited AI as the cause of its growing emissions. 

“In 2020, we unveiled what we called our carbon moonshot. That was before the explosion in artificial intelligence,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president, told Bloomberg at the time.  

“So, in many ways the moon is five times as far away as it was in 2020, if you just think of our own forecast for the expansion of AI and its electrical needs,” he added. 

AI requires significantly more energy than other processes. A single ChatGPT request uses 2.9 watt-hours of electricity, while a typical Google search uses just 0.3 watt-hours, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). 

Generating images with AI requires even more energy than generating text. On average, image generation uses over 60 times the energy of text generation, according to a study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon and the AI startup Hugging Face. 

This translates into more emissions. Using the popular text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion XL to create 1,000 images produces the same amount of emissions as driving an average gas-powered car 4.1 miles, the study found. 

Despite Microsoft’s rising emissions, Smith has argued that "the answer is not to slow down.” 

“We fundamentally believe that the answer is not to slow down the expansion of AI but to speed up the work needed to make it more environmentally friendly,” he said. “I guarantee there’s one way to fail: It’s to give up.” 

Environmental advocates aren’t convinced. Michael Khoo, the climate disinformation program director at Friends of the Earth, argued that tech firms are very focused on “AI for good” and not “AI for bad.” 

“So much of the AI discussion coming from Silicon Valley is centered on how AI is going to save humanity, whether you're looking at words from [OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman or from DeepMind or from [Elon] Musk, all of them use this as a talking point,” Khoo told The Hill. 

“I can't predict the future ... but currently, today and tomorrow, it's doing really, really bad things for the planet,” he added. 

With the rise of AI, as well as slowing efficiency gains, data center energy demand is rising rapidly. The IEA estimates that global electricity consumption by data centers could double between 2022 and 2026, adding the equivalent of “at least one Sweden or at most one Germany.” 

By 2030, Goldman Sachs Research estimates that data center power demand will have grown 160 percent. The accompanying uptick in carbon dioxide emissions could have a social cost between $125 billion and $140 billion. 

With this uptick in demand, the question becomes whether that additional energy comes from carbon-free sources, like wind and solar, or “brown” sources, like natural gas and coal, said Benjamin Lee, a professor of electrical and systems engineering and computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania. 

This is complicated by the fact that data center construction is currently outpacing renewable energy installation, Lee noted. 

“When we’re looking at how much renewable energy is being put on the grid in any given year, the data centers could consume all of it and then some,” he told The Hill. “So, there’s a mismatch between the growth rates that we’ve seen.” 

Khoo emphasized that the U.S. is currently “in the middle of a very tough build out of our renewable energy infrastructure.” 

“There is no excess supply of renewable energy in America right now,” he said. 

As a result, utility companies are increasingly looking to fossil fuels to keep up with growing energy demand. 

“Utilities don’t see how they can meet that, in the short term at least, without more fossil fuel, more thermal plant operation,” former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said at an energy conference in March. 

The use of fossil fuels — coal, oil and gas — is the main driver of climate change. This warming has led to an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather, including flooding and droughts, in addition to heat waves.  

These extremes are expected to worsen if the planet continues getting hotter, especially if key “tipping points” that change the system and are difficult to reverse — such as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and Arctic permafrost — are reached. 

Overall, the world’s average surface temperature has warmed by more than 1.1 degrees Celsius (about 2 degrees Fahrenheit), according to a United Nations report last year that warned of a "rapidly closing window" to combat warming. 

“This couldn't come at a worse time,” Khoo said. “We're at a point where we can just all look outside in America today and most days for the greatly expanding effects of climate change.”

Rachel Frazin contributed to this report.