Effluent|The energy consumption of data centers increased.
A technology company Google’s emissions increased by 48 percent in the last five years due to the expansion of data centers that power artificial intelligence, says the economic newspaper Financial Times (FT).
This raises doubts about the realization of Google’s carbon neutrality goal, the magazine interprets. Google aims to be “net zero” by 2030.
Google published on Tuesday its climate report.
The company emissions were 14.3 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent last year, which corresponds to a 48 percent increase from 2019 and a 13 percent increase compared to the previous year, FT says.
According to Google, the increase was primarily influenced by data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions.
According to the report, the energy consumption of data centers increased by 17 percent compared to the previous year.
Emissions related to energy needs, which mainly come from data centers, increased by 37 percent from the previous year, FT says. Energy emissions account for about a quarter of total emissions.
Emissions from supply chains, which according to FT represent the rest, grew by 8 percent. According to Google, these emissions will increase in the near future due to the construction of the infrastructure needed to run artificial intelligence, FT reports.
Google according to FT, the growth underlines the “challengingness” of simultaneous emission reduction and language model investments. According to Google, “future environmental effects of artificial intelligence” are difficult and complicated to predict.
The company expects emissions to continue to rise until they decrease “towards the target”. Google vows to work hard to reduce emissions.
World the biggest techno giants have announced their intentions to invest billions in artificial intelligence. At the same time, climate experts have raised concerns about the climate effects of energy-intensive artificial intelligence, FT says.
In May, Microsoft announced that its emissions had risen by almost a third since 2020, largely due to the construction of data centers, FT says. Google and Microsoft have argued that artificial intelligence can promote the development of climate solutions.
Finland too was mentioned in the report: Hamina’s data center made good use of “carbon-free energy” compared to other Google data centers in the world.
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