AI advances expected to kill Google’s green agenda progress

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggested last week that the company’s climate targets are essentially hopeless in light of the rise of power-intensive artificial intelligence (AI) technology, Axios reported.

Schmidt shared his view during a conference last week in Washington, D.C. that Google’s emissions goals, which include reaching net-zero carbon emissions across its operations by 2030, will not be met because the data centers that will power AI technologies are going to consume massive volumes of electricity, according to Axios. In a July report, Google disclosed that its corporate emissions have increased by 48% relative to 2019 levels in large part because of its growing collection of data centers.

“My own opinion is that we’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we’re not organized to do it,” Schmidt said at the event, according to Axios. Whatever improvements may be made to energy efficiency in the near future “will be swamped by the enormous needs of this new technology,” Schmidt continued, referencing AI.

“The needs in this area will be a problem,” Schmidt said, Axios reported. “But I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem than constraining it.”

Schmidt is known as a “longtime climate hawk,” according to Axios.

Along with other factors like electric vehicles (EVs), AI data centers are expected to drive up electricity demand in the U.S. over the coming years after staying mostly flat for two decades, according to The New York Times. Goldman Sachs projects that data centers — which currently account for 1-2% of global power consumption — will eat up about 3-4% of overall power supply by the end of the decade, and that emissions from those facilities may end up doubling between 2022 and 2030.

In the U.S., grid planners are now expecting power demand to increase by about 4.7% over the next five years, a major jump from the previous estimate of approximately 2.6%, according to UtilityDive. Some tech companies are looking to strike deals with energy companies to secure electricity directly from nuclear power plants, while power grid experts are warning that climate policies and regulations are forcing the premature retirement of reliable generation more quickly than it can be replaced by green sources.

Google did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

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