AI not to blame: Google said the development of AI services actually didn’t have that much of an impact on its carbon emissions

Not long ago, Google published a report in which it admitted that its CO2 emissions in 2023 increased by 13% year-on-year and by 48% compared to 2019. But Google chief scientist Jeff Dean said AI is wrongly blamed for the company’s rising carbon emissions, The Register reports. He also emphasized that the business still intends to completely switch to “clean” energy by 2030.

The reasons for the increase in emissions are the increase in data center energy consumption, as well as the company’s supply chain. Inevitably, however, the public has come to blame AI for rising emissions, in part because Google has been rapidly expanding the capabilities of its AI systems in recent years. In an interview with Fortune, Dean said AI is not actually to blame for rising data center emissions because it accounts for only a small portion of computing, but acknowledged that the segment is growing at a rapid pace.

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Dean confirmed that Google does not intend to abandon its goal of 100 percent transition to clean energy by the end of 2030, and added evasively that “progress in this matter is not linear.” For example, some of the company’s projects in the field of carbon-free energy supply may be crowned with success only years after the start.

Google’s ESG report states that Scope 2 emissions (including from energy suppliers) increased by 37%, accounting for 24% of the company’s total carbon emissions in 2023. At the same time, the company claims that all its energy needs are 100% compensated by the purchase of renewable energy sources. Google noted that it uses its own methodology for calculating Scope 2 emissions, which differs from the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) methodology.

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Google’s report also states that while consumption across all of the company’s data centers grew by 17%, reaching 3.5 TWh in 2023, its cloud and search business segments managed to maintain average carbon-free energy use at 64%. How the IT giant intends to bring this figure to 100%, if its energy appetite is only growing, and the introduction of new “green” sources does not keep up with them, is not specified.

Google isn’t the only company having trouble meeting its environmental goals. Microsoft admits that its CO2 emissions rose 29.1% in 2020, but justifies this by the need to build and equip more and more data centers to meet demand for cloud and AI services. But AWS managed to reduce them, although there are also questions about the correctness of the company’s emissions calculations.