Google’s emissions climbed by almost half over five years, as the company has infused artificial intelligence throughout many of its core products — making it harder to meet its goal of eliminating carbon emissions by 2030, according to a new environmental report from the tech giant.
“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,” Google wrote in the report. AI — and in particular generative AI, which takes in user inputs and spits out new content like text, images or songs — is extremely resource-intensive, as a recent Bloomberg News investigation showed. As the technology grows rapidly, more and more data centers are needed to build and run it, leading to surging power requirements.Silicon Valley salaries are shrinking, leaving workers in the lurch
Google is not the first major technology company to cite the rapid growth of AI as an obstacle to achieving environmental goals. In May, Microsoft Corp. said its carbon emissions climbed 30% since 2020, as the company increasingly invested in AI. The increase made that company’s target of getting to below net-zero emissions by 2030 even harder than it was when it announced its carbon-negative goal.