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.
Read more in a full report at TheHill.com.
