Image: Getty via Dennis
The results are in: artificial intelligence (AI) is doing more than crunching numbers to write boilerplate text to fill up websites or cobble together dodgy images. It is also spewing carbon dioxide into the air.
According to an environmental report published by the company this week (PDF), Google’s greenhouse gas gas emissions rose by 48% since 2019.
The rise in emissions is “due to increasing energy demands from the greater intensity of AI compute,” the company said.
It is not as though this was unexpected, but the scale of the increase is worth noting. In 2023, Google’s total greenhouse gas emissions increased 13% year-on-year, reaching 14.3 million tonnes.
In its defence, Google is not hiding from the result, and while promoting its use of renewable energy it does at least state in the report that it is “clear-eyed about its potential environmental impact and the collaborative effort required to navigate this evolving landscape”.
That said, one slightly curious sentence seems to be saying ‘don’t look at us, look as those manufacturers over there’: “Additionally, system-level changes are needed to address challenges such as grid decarbonization, evolving regulations, hard-to-decarbonise industries, and the availability of carbon-free energy”.
All the while the, frustrating at times, data centre debate in Ireland rumbles on. On which point, it does seem to me that a clearer distinction should be made between real critical infrastructure and speculative punts on property masquerading as data centres. Secondly, failing to build data centres does not make computation go away. Instead it is simply run on servers in even more inefficient on-premise hardware.
Nevertheless, denying the environmental impact of information technology is a fool’s errand. Computation is, whether we think about it or not, a physical process in which electricity is used to manipulate logic gates, however immaterial browsing the Internet on your phone or laptop may seem.
Nor is Google alone in seeing its energy use climb. As noted by TechCentral in May, Microsoft’s emissions have also ballooned thanks to the AI boom.
Data centre emissions, then, are clearly a legitimate focus for regulation and legislation, and a rational debate about how they might be controlled and reduced would be welcome. Until then, though, there is one thing that we could all do that would at least ground the discussion in reality, and that is to acknowledge the material nature of technology.
In other words, we, the end users, need to stop thinking about computing as a form of magic and the internet as a virtual non-space or ‘consensual hallucination’. The internet is a collection of servers, switches and cables, all of which have a material existence in a physical world, taking up space and using energy. Once we have a grip on that we might be better able to do something about it.
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#Googles #outsized #emissions #remind #real #nature #Internet
