The rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) is driving up energy consumption among Big Tech companies, jeopardizing their ambitious decarbonization targets.
The renewable revolution's biggest superheroes are at risk of turning into its biggest villains. For years, Silicon Valley's biggest players have been among the most vocal and most deep pocketed proponents of clean energy investment. But now, thanks to the runaway energy demand driven by artificial intelligence, Big Tech 's emissions are sharply on the rise and its lofty decarbonization goals are becoming ever more far-fetched.
The bigwigs behind tech companies including Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI are now pushing harder than ever for greater deployment of renewable energy infrastructure and increased research and development of novel clean and alternative energies, but keeping up with the voracious energy appetite of AI is a tall order. Google's 2024 Environmental Report revealed that the company's greenhouse gas emissions have surged nearly 50% since 2019, driven by the massive expansion of AI use in the company's operations. As a result, the company now publicly recognizes that its own ambitious goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2030 is becoming increasingly challenging if not impossible to achieve. 'AI-powered services involve considerably more computer power - and so electricity - than standard online activity, prompting a series of warnings about the technology's environmental impact,' the BBC recently reported. A study published earlier this year by scientists at Cornell University found that generative AI systems like ChatGPT use up to 33 times more energy than standard computers running task-specific software, and each and every AI-powered internet query e.g., a Google search consumes about ten times more energy than a traditional query. And AI is quickly becoming the norm. As a result, the amount of energy needed to sustain the AI sector's growth is doubling about every 100 days. At this rate, the AI sector alone could be responsible for a whopping 3.5 percent of global energy consumption by 2030, according to some expert projection
Artificial Intelligence Renewable Energy Environmental Impact Big Tech Decarbonization
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