Google, like other tech giants, has gone all-in on investing in artificial intelligence – seen as the next major tech revolution. The company has integrated its Gemini generative AI technology into some of its core projects, including Search and Google Assistant.
But the evolving technology has a major problem: the energy-hungry data centres that Google and other Big Tech rivals are currently spending tens of thousands of dollars each quarter to expand in order to fuel their ambitions.
Illustrating the amount of energy AI models demand compared to traditional computing systems, there is a concerning possibility that Google’s AI systems could eventually consume as much electricity as the country of Ireland every year, according to an October study.
Google seeks net zero emissions by 2030 but admits …
Google released its 2024 Environmental Report recently to highlight that its greenhouse gas emissions last year were 48% more than in 2019. It blames the increasing amount of energy needed by its data centres, driven by the explosive expansion of AI.
Google seeks to reach net zero emissions by 2030 but admits that the process may be challenging as it further integrates AI into its products. AI-supported services involve considerably more computing – and so more electricity – than standard activities.
Data centres are massive collections of computer servers and AI needs a huge amount of them. A generative AI system – like ChatGPT – might use around 33 times more energy than machines running task-specific software, according to a different study.
Dark data demanding lots of energy. But is it valuable?
Google’s 2024 Environmental Report also reveals large disparities in the impacts of its data centres. Most of the centres in Europe and the Americas use far more carbon-free energy, compared to centres in the Middle East, Asia and Australia.
“If you actually go into data centre, it is really hot and really noisy,” says Professor Tom Jackson at Loughborough University. “People don’t realise everything they are storing in the cloud is having an impact on their digital carbon footprint.”
But Prof Jackson also highlights that on average, 65% of the data an organisation stores is dark data. Dark data is data that has been collected by organisations but that has either been used once or not at all. But they still take up large amounts of energy.
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