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.The Alphabet unit said its greenhouse gas emissions totaled 14.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent throughout 2023.
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.
Google is not the first major technology company to cite the rapid growth of AI as an obstacle to achieving environmental goals.