Google’s Emissions Have Surged Nearly 50% Due to AI Energy Demand

Google’s greenhouse gas emissions have climbed over 48% since 2019, with the search giant’s increasing dependency on AI in its data centers dramatically increasing its power consumption.  In the company’s 2024 Environmental Report, Google has now conceded that there’s “significant uncertainty” around reaching its target, saying it “won’t be easy” to reach its “extremely ambitious” goal of achieving net zero emissions by 2030. 

Back in 2020, Google parent Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) announced a 24/7 CFE goal to run its entire business on carbon-free energy by 2030, matching electricity demand with CFE supply every hour of every day.

Back in May, Google revealed that it plans to spend $1.1bn to expand its main data center in Finland due to the location’s access to green energy. However, the company will have to contend with the surging power demand growth being witnessed across diverse industries in Western economies thanks in large part to the ongoing AI boom. 

Last year,  power consulting firm Grid Strategies published a report titled “The Era of Flat Power Demand is Over,” wherein it revealed that United States grid planners--including regional transmission operators (RTOs) and utilities--had nearly doubled their 5-year power demand growth projections. AI, in particular, is driving a lot of that power demand growth. 

According to the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), data centers will gobble-up up to 9% of total electricity generated in the United States by 2030, up from ~1.5% currently thanks to the rapid adoption of power-hungry technologies such as generative AI. For some perspective, last year, the U.S. industrial sector energy consumed 1.02 million GWh, good for 26% of U.S. electricity consumption. 

These findings come as little surprise considering that AI-servers are real power-guzzlers. To wit, Digiconomist estimates that a single NVIDIA DGX A100 server consumes as much electricity as several U.S. households combined while hyperscale data centers can consume 1GW of electricity, equivalent to the output of a nuclear power plant.

By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com

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