Google’s emissions shot up 48% over five years due to AI

By Rachel Metz | Bloomberg

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 annual report was released Tuesday and covers Google’s progress toward meeting its environmental goals last year. The Alphabet Inc. unit said its greenhouse gas emissions totaled 14.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent throughout 2023. This is 48% higher than in 2019, the company said, and 13% higher than in 2022. Google said higher energy consumption at its data centers and emissions from its supply chain were to blame, and said its push to add AI to its products could make it more difficult to reduce emissions going forward.

“As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands from the greater intensity of AI compute, and the emissions associated with the expected increases in our technical infrastructure investment,” Google wrote in the report.

For several years, the Mountain View, California-based company has said it plans to eliminate such emissions from its operations by 2030.

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.