As big tech companies race to reap the benefits of the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, the energy-hungry technology is hindering companies’ efforts to curb emissions and become carbon neutral or carbon negative.
Google revealed that its greenhouse gas emissions will increase by 13% in 2023 and 48% since 2019, clashing with its goal of reaching net zero by the end of the decade.
The main culprit? AI.
“As we further integrate AI into our products, the increased intensity of AI computing could increase energy demands and make it more difficult to reduce emissions,” Google wrote in its annual environmental report.
Microsoft’s annual sustainability report, released in May, found that the company’s emissions have increased 29 percent since 2020. The tech giant, which aims to be carbon negative by 2030, similarly cited AI as a cause of its growing emissions.
“In 2020, we announced what we called the Carbon Moonshot, and that was before the explosion of artificial intelligence,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chairman and president. Bloomberg at that time.
“Just looking at our projections for the expansion of AI and its power needs, in many ways the moon is five times further away than it was in 2020,” he added.
AI requires significantly more energy than other processes: according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), a single ChatGPT request consumes 2.9 watt-hours of power, compared to just 0.3 watt-hours for a typical Google search.
Generating images with AI requires even more energy than generating text: On average, generating an image consumes 60 times more energy than generating text, according to a study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and AI startup Hugging Face.
This leads to increased emissions: A study found that creating 1,000 images using the popular text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion XL produces the same amount of emissions as driving 4.1 miles in an average gasoline-powered car.
Despite Microsoft’s growing emissions, Smith argues that “the solution is not to slow down.”
“Fundamentally, I believe the answer is not to slow down the scale of AI, but to accelerate the work necessary to make it greener,” he said. “I categorically argue there is only one way to fail: to give up.”
Environmentalists aren’t convinced. Michael Ku, climate disinformation program director at Friends of the Earth, argued that tech companies are very focused on “AI good” and not enough on “AI bad.”
“Much of the discussion about AI in Silicon Valley is focused on how AI will save humanity. [OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman, DeepMind, [Elon] “Musk, they’re all talking about this,” Koo told The Hill.
“You can’t predict the future, but there are really negative consequences for the planet right now, today and tomorrow,” he added.
The rise of AI and slowing efficiency gains are causing data centres’ energy demands to grow rapidly: the IEA predicts that global electricity consumption by data centres will double between 2022 and 2026, to the equivalent of “at least the size of a country like Sweden and up to the size of a country like Germany”.
Goldman Sachs Research predicts that data center electricity demand will increase by 160% by 2030. The associated increase in carbon dioxide emissions could result in a societal cost of $125 billion to $140 billion.
This increased demand raises the question of whether that extra energy will come from carbon-free sources like wind and solar, or from “brown” sources like natural gas and coal, said Benjamin Lee, a professor of electrical and systems engineering and computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Li noted that the situation is complicated by the fact that data center construction is currently outpacing renewable energy installations.
“If you look at how much renewable energy is being put onto the grid in any given year, data centers could consume it all and potentially even more,” he told The Hill. “So there’s a discrepancy in the growth rates that we’ve seen.”
Koo emphasized that the United States is currently “in the midst of a very intense build-out of renewable energy infrastructure.”
“Right now, there is no excess supply of renewable energy in the United States,” he said.
As a result, power companies are increasingly turning to fossil fuels to meet growing energy demand.
“Utilities believe they can’t meet their targets, at least in the short term, without ramping up fossil fuel and coal-fired power plants,” former Energy Secretary Ernesto Moniz said at an energy conference in March.
The use of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas is a major cause of climate change. This warming is causing increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as heatwaves, floods and droughts.
These extreme conditions are expected to get worse if the planet continues to warm, especially if it reaches critical “tipping points” that change systems in ways that are difficult to reverse, such as melting the Greenland ice sheet or Arctic permafrost.
A United Nations report released last year warned that global average surface temperatures have risen by 1.1 degrees Celsius (about 2 degrees Fahrenheit) overall and that the “window of opportunity is rapidly closing” to combat global warming.
“It couldn’t come at a worse time,” Koo said. “We’re at a point today, and most days, where all we have to do is look at the massive impacts of climate change in the United States.”
Rachel Frazin contributed to this report.
