538

Google’s carbon emissions soar by 48% due to AI (www.climateaction.org)

submitted 4 months ago by 0x815@feddit.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

64 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The leap in emissions is largely due to energy-guzzling data centers and supply chain emissions necessary to power artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The report estimated that in 2023, Google’s data centers alone account for up to 10% of global data center electricity consumption. Their data center electricity and water consumption both increased 17% between 2022 and 2023.

Google released 14.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide just last year, 13% higher than the year before.

Climate scientists have shown concerns as Big Tech giants such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft continue to invest billons of dollars into AI.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 102 points 4 months ago

These companies 100% said they'd be carbon neutral by 2030 in order to take the wind out of the sails of people pushing for carbon taxes, rather than because they actually intended on doing it.

[-] Frozengyro@lemmy.world 26 points 4 months ago

Could be the other way as well. Prepare to become carbon neutral in order to have less tax burden. But once that fell though, they didn't care again. The only way they will be carbon neutral is if governments make it more expensive for them to not be.

[-] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 23 points 4 months ago

Yup. The one thing that is certain is that you cannot just leave companies to self-regulate.

this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024

538 points (98.2% liked)

Technology

59081 readers

3019 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS