Google released its 2024 environmental report on Jul. 2, 2024, detailing the data and progress of the company's sustainability efforts in 2023.

In the report, the tech company revealed its environmental footprint, including a 48 per cent increase in its greenhouse gas emissions since 2019.

Over the years, Google has been investing substantially in AI (artificial intelligence), which has been attributed as the cause for the rise in emissions.

Generative AI's energy demands

The report stated that Google's greenhouse gas emissions totalled 14.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCo2e) in 2023.

This reflected a 13 per cent year-over-year increase, and a 48 per cent increase from 2019.

Google stated that this increase was "primarily due to increases in data centre energy consumption and supply chain emissions".

Data centres store huge volumes of information to power AI models such as Google's Gemini and OpenAI's GPT-4.

These are in turn used to power the ChatGPT chatbot, a generative AI developed in 2022.

Generative AI is a tool capable of producing new texts, images, audio or video clips from scratch.

It uses around 33 times more energy than machines running task-specific software, according to a recent study cited by BBC.

According to CNN, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated that a Google search query requires 0.3 watt-hours of electricity on average, while a ChatGPT request typically consumes almost nine times more.

The IEA also believed that data centres could be using a total of 1,000 terawatt-hours of electricity annually by 2026, which is "roughly equivalent to the electricity consumption of Japan,” reported BBC.

A wavering goal

In 2021, Google announced its "bold goal" to achieve net-zero emissions by 2030.

Additionally, the company stated in its report that it has also been working to "advance water stewardship, build a circular economy, and restore and enhance nature and biodiversity".

Since 2017, Google has been matching 100 per cent of their annual electricity consumption with renewable energy globally.

Google was the first major company to do so.

However, the tech giant admitted in the report, "As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands from the greater intensity of AI compute."

Google has since described reaching its 2030 net-zero goal by 2030 as "extremely ambitious".

This is because there is "uncertainty" around the future environmental impacts of AI, which are "complex and difficult to predict".

AI will help achieve climate goals: Bill Gates

Despite these concerns about AI's impact on the environment, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates recently stated that AI could be more boon than bane for the climate.

Downplaying fears about the amount of energy data centres consume, Gates said that data centres are "in the most extreme case, a 6 per cent addition [in energy demand] but probably only 2 per cent to 2.5 per cent," The Guardian reported.

He added that the increased demand in energy by AI data centres are likely to be matched by new investments in green electricity.

In his view, tech companies were "seriously willing" to pay more for clean electricity in order "to say that they’re using green energy".

Top photo from Canva