Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

The headline is bogus and most of the comments are responding to the headline. Google's emissions increased 13% since last year, "primarily due to increases in data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions." It's unclear how much is due to AI. The supposed surge is a 48% increase compared to *2019*, consisting of moderate increases every year since 2020, not a nearly 50% surge due to AI.

Google's document is at: https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2024-e... See pdf page 8 / document page 7 for details, as well as the graph on page 32/31.

I see the current gold rush of AI the same way I saw crypto-currencies. Even if originally there were people that believed in the concept it became just a snake-oil sellers business.

The parallelism is made even more relevant by its hungry use of electricity.

There is a future for AI but it is not what we see companies developing right now. Chat-bots are more dystopian and problematic than useful. AI future (and present) is on analyzing big chunks of data about chemical bounds, traffic-flow, astronomical observations, etc.

But all that really useful AI is not attracting the kind of investment that flashy consumer-oriented chat-bots are getting.

The galling part of this is that the demand for AI is artificial. Consumers are not demanding AI.

Here's the underlying report that this CNBC story is based on: https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2024-e...

The key driver for the CO2 growth is "scope 2" emissions, mainly electricity demand from data centers. See pages 34-38 in the PDF for the definition of scope 2 emissions and overall progress on running data centers with carbon free energy. They're currently at 63% CFE, the same as in 2022, but absolute growth in electricity consumption also meant absolute growth in emissions from the other 37%.

I don't like 2024 Google, but they seem to be the only ones trying (at least) to make the least impact with their energy consumption.

Why aren't there hit pieces like this on the US intelligence massive Utah Data Center? (for example)

And once again a big tech company proves that as soon as their "principes" are put to the test they will abandon them almost instantly.

When buying some wind energy was easy and wasn't really a trade-off they were quick to use big phrases like being "committed to the planet" and such. Commitments seem to be rather "flexible" with these companies.

In my imagination, I picture a long-time Google employee who spent his/her entire career dutifully pouring over every minutia of their search infrastructure to squeeze the most performance out of every watt, in a quest to make Google a better, more environmentally friendly company. And then comes AI...

Interesting how CO2 consumption is everywhere (because of ESG) but no mention about clean water consumption on cooling serves.

https://time.com/5814276/google-data-centers-water/

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/analysis/data-center-w...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/24907379

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00478-x

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01377-7

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-6la_I-xkQ

Google's latest environmental report posted today: https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/2024...

That should be weighted against how many CO2 is saved by LLM due to increased efficiency. A person living large in a big house, eating well, flying overseas for vacations, with 2-3 cars in the garage, consumes much more CO2 than a GPU that replaces him.

Luckily we have ways to create energy emissions-free.

Scaling hypothesis baby! maybe the bitter lesson wasn't so bitter after all

It turns out AI will kill us, but not in the way that the billionaires were paranoid about. Who needs guns when a planet-sized gas chamber will do?

meaningless stat in the grand scheme of things. eventually, it will all transition to nuclear/solar. the question is does it move the needle in a meaningful way right now. so much hand wringing about carbon emissions only for germany to end up burning coal again.

So this is why people eventual become batteries for the matrix.

A few solutions for this:

- "Ask HN: How to reuse waste heat and water from AI datacenters?" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40820952

- "Ask HN: Can CPUs etc. be made from just graphene and/or other carbon forms?" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40719725

(Edit)

- "Desalination system could produce freshwater that is cheaper than tap water" (2023) : "Extreme salt-resisting multistage solar distilation with thermohaline convection" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39999225 ... "AI Is Accelerating the Loss of Our Scarcest Natural Resource: Water" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40783690

- "Ask HN: Does mounting servers parallel with the temperature gradient trap heat?" (2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23033210 :

> Would mounting servers sideways (vertically) allow heat to transfer out of the rack? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39555606