The tech giant admits that Google’s carbon emissions are higher than ever due to the energy intensity of AI

Google is pumping out more greenhouse gases than ever before – its CO2 emissions have risen by 48 percent over the past five years.

And this despite the intention of the technological giant to produce net zero emissions by 2030.

Google’s latest environmental report shows that its greenhouse gas emissions were 13 percent higher in 2023 than in 2022 – producing the equivalent of 14.3 million tons of CO2.

This is similar to the amount of CO2 that approximately 29 gas-fired power plants would produce in a year.

The main reason was increased energy consumption from data center consumption and its supply chain, the report said, as well as artificial intelligence (AI).

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Artificial intelligence – which uses large amounts of computing power and, in turn, electricity – increases the firm’s energy consumption and will make reducing emissions “challenging”, the company said.

The increase in emissions comes despite Google increasingly using solar and wind power generated by clean energy that doesn’t produce emissions like fossil fuels (such as coal and gas).

“Despite the progress we’re making, we face significant challenges that we’re actively working on,” chief sustainability officer Kate Brandt and senior vice president Benedict Gomes said in the release.

“As we further integrate AI into our products, emissions reductions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands resulting from higher computational intensity of AI and emissions associated with the expected increase in investment in our technical infrastructure.”

In January, Google pledged to invest $1bn (£788m) in the UK to build a new data center in response to demands around AI.

Google, largely spurred by the success of rival ChatGPT, has invested heavily in artificial intelligence as part of its Gemini chat tool, as well as software on its smartphones.

Google isn’t the only tech firm facing the challenge of feeding energy-hungry AI data centers while also trying to curb the creation of climate-altering greenhouse gases.

Microsoft said in its recent sustainability report that its greenhouse gas emissions rose 29 percent last year compared to 2020 as it continues to “invest in the infrastructure needed to develop new technologies.”

Microsoft and Google have been leading the AI ​​race since OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022.

Artificial intelligence was a topic for competitors in the blockbuster quarterly earnings.

Meanwhile, Google and Microsoft have pledged to be carbon neutral by the end of the decade.

Microsoft has another goal to be carbon negative by 2050, removing the climate-damaging gas from the air.

Amazon, also an artificial intelligence contender with its cloud computing division AWS, has said it aims to be carbon neutral by 2040.