After Microsoft, Google… The world number one in online search has seen its CO emissions2 jump by 13% in 2023 and by 48% since 2019, the company revealed on Tuesday, July 2, in its environmental report. These amount to 14.3 million tonnes of CO equivalent2The cause of this surge, which goes against the climate objectives of the American group? The explosion of artificial intelligence (AI). As for Microsoft, which had to announce, in mid-May, a similar jump in its emissions, of 30% in one year.
“This result is mainly due to the growth in electricity consumption of our data centers and emissions linked to our suppliers,” writes Google. The former, which represent around a quarter of emissions, are up 37% over a year, and the latter, which account for three quarters of the total, have grown by 8%.
“As we further integrate artificial intelligence into our products, reducing our emissions may prove challenging due to the growing energy requirements of AI-related computing intensity and the emissions associated with our planned increased infrastructure investments,” explains the company.
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New capabilities in data centers
In short, the development of AI is causing the need for computing to train and then run generative AI models capable of creating texts or images to explode. Electrical needs are following the same trend: a user’s query on an AI assistant like ChatGPT consumes about 10 times more energy than a query on a traditional search engine. Google, like its competitors in the cloud sector Microsoft and Amazon, is therefore obliged to create a lot of new capacity in its data centers. This generates indirect emissions linked to the computer chips in the servers and the construction of the buildings.
Read the column | Article reserved for our subscribers “The explosion in electricity demand linked to AI is already having local consequences”
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The rise seems to call into question or move away from the objective set by Google to reach “zero net emissions by 2030” (a result predicting a 50% reduction in 2019 emissions and 50% investment in solutions “sequestration” The company assures that it is maintaining this course, while judging it “very ambitious.” “We know that achieving it will not be easy. Our approach will continue to evolve and will require us to accommodate significant uncertainty – including uncertainty about the future environmental impact of AI, which is complex and difficult to predict,” writes Google.
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