Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries

The article doesn’t break out Google/MS proper from their cloud offerings, so it’s not really fair to say they’re using more power like the folks at these companies are choosing to do this. They rent compute and their customers are using a lot more of it. If google just said “we’re not renting out GPUs to save the environment” people would just shift to a competitor.

I think the reality is that they are running the workloads of all of the customers of GCP and Azure collectively - and provided they're offsetting those emissions and hosting them with green energy where possible - it should be a net win for the environment that they're hosting this much infra. It also encourages prioritization on systematic efficiency improvements where possible. I think google was one of the first providers to publish and push for PUAs of their datacenters close to 1.0.

They also have programs in place for e-waste recycling and safe refrigerant destruction where it is available - things that you will not see in colocation-type facilities.

Depends on what they are doing. Consuming a large amount of energy for cloud platforms isn't the worst, as that'd be done by the customers directly if the cloud didbt exist after all.

Using it on generative AI on the other hand is burning huge amounts of energy, manpower and effort on a robot that advises how to cook spaghetti in gasoline for flavor. A complete waste.

This makes sense as their market cap and revenues are also larger than many countries.

Max Barry wrote a book in 2003 called Jennifer Government [0] about a near future where companies were so big they had their own armies and intelligence agencies. It seems like we’re getting close to that point.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40859993

A click bait headline vs. content but a concern documented by the company.

Personally, I'm not much concerned about their energy consumption per se but rather by their energy mix. I would be more than fine if they had all their energy sourced from solar panels and wind turbines.

hmm, but those fairly big countries are also heavy users of Google/Microsoft products, aren't they?

If every country had to create their own version of those products we would end up having still more power consumption - considering that not every one would be able to have the kind of professionals that Google and Microsoft have.

"Fairly big countries" is such a cop out. What do you mean by big? Population? Economy? Energy consumption?

The original twitter post just says "More electricity than many countries". The fact that Google and Microsoft consume the same order magnitude of electricity as Nigeria (population 220 million), Ireland (population 5 million), Ecuador (18 million), Slovakia (5 million), Iceland (population 0.4 million), really just speaks the vast inequality in the world, even amongst countries.

It's interesting and relevant that Microsoft and Google are now "country scale", in terms of energy production. But when you realize that US energy consumption in 2023 was 4000TWh (MS and Google apparently each used 24), you realize just how non-serious this comparison is. The comparison can be thought provoking, but the actual results aren't particularly meaningful.

Given how wildly profitable they are, we should be passing laws that they must produce X % of their power needs from renewable sources, where X approaches 100%. This would be a jobs program that would also help the planet. Win win.

Investors would make slightly less money in the short term, but our grandchildren will be able to live. I think that is a good trade off.

Something bugs me about this framing. I see that it can be useful, but Google's power consumption is not independent of, e.g., Spain's consumption. Big tech's power consumption is, largely, our power consumption minus development (which, like AI, can be high).