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Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

cnbc.com

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Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#81

Post by thethirdone »

WheatMillington wrote: post #59
kens wrote: post #39

The headline is bogus and most of the comments are responding to the headline. Google's emissions increased 13% since last year, "primarily due to increases in data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions." It's unclear how much is due to AI. The supposed surge is a 48% increase compared to *2019*, consisting of moderate increases every year since 2020, not a nearly 50% surge due to AI. Google's document…

Your comment is a little dismissive. Firstly, the headline doesn't mention "versus last year", and the 48% figure is straight from the document you mentioned and is repeated often within that document. It's directly from Google, and is significant. Moreover that document itself states (page 31) "As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands". It's…

The article does a good job of clearly stating that the 48% is compared to 2019, but words like "surge" and "spike" do not closely match that factual basis and imho are misleading.

Attributing the 48% to AI specifically is largely baseless though. From my skim, the Google report does not make any specific claims about the increase in datacenter emission coming from AI. The closest claims are on page 12 where "the rapid advancement of AI has brought necessary increased attention to its energy consumption and resource demands" is juxtaposed with "total data center electricity consumption grew 17%"

In particular the third "key point" seems highly misleading.

> The company attributed the emissions spike to an increase in data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions driven by rapid advancements in and demand for AI.

The word "spike" does not occur in the document and the 48% number is never close to a mention of AI. While the 17% "spike" may have been attributed to AI by Google, I think it is clear the document does not attribute the 48% to AI.

Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#82

Post by slashdave »

In my imagination, I picture a long-time Google employee who spent his/her entire career dutifully pouring over every minutia of their search infrastructure to squeeze the most performance out of every watt, in a quest to make Google a better, more environmentally friendly company. And then comes AI...

Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#83

Post by klyrs »

kens wrote: post #39

The headline is bogus and most of the comments are responding to the headline. Google's emissions increased 13% since last year, "primarily due to increases in data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions." It's unclear how much is due to AI. The supposed surge is a 48% increase compared to *2019*, consisting of moderate increases every year since 2020, not a nearly 50% surge due to AI. Google's document…

Timnit Gebru was fired in late 2020 for publicly examining the energy consumption of LLMs, perhaps that would be a more poignant start-time.

Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#85

Post by omnicognate »

sva_ wrote: post #64
peppertree wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure people said the same about fiber internet in the 2000's.

> A winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Paul Krugman wrote in 1998, “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the eco…

I'm all for doing down Nobel prize winning Paul Nobel prize winning Krugman and his Nobel prize (did you know he got a Nobel prize?) but as hideously as most of that has aged the bit about most people having nothing to say to each other was spot on.

Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#86

Post by timeon »

MicolashKyoka wrote: post #21

meaningless stat in the grand scheme of things. eventually, it will all transition to nuclear/solar. the question is does it move the needle in a meaningful way right now. so much hand wringing about carbon emissions only for germany to end up burning coal again.

Germany meme is nice, but it is probably just a dent in global coal use that breaks new record almost every year. Transition to nuclear/solar is still fantasy.

https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#88

Post by jeffbee »

klyrs wrote: post #83
kens wrote: post #39

The headline is bogus and most of the comments are responding to the headline. Google's emissions increased 13% since last year, "primarily due to increases in data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions." It's unclear how much is due to AI. The supposed surge is a 48% increase compared to *2019*, consisting of moderate increases every year since 2020, not a nearly 50% surge due to AI. Google's document…

Timnit Gebru was fired in late 2020 for publicly examining the energy consumption of LLMs, perhaps that would be a more poignant start-time.

Gebru's estimates of AI energy consumption were adopted from Strubell. Strubell's estimates of AI energy consumption are ridiculous and according to David Patterson range from 88x to 10000x high. My humble opinion on the affair is that the conflict between Gebru and the rest of the company arose from Gebru's refusal to use the best and most comprehensive information on AI energy consumption, that is what they had access to firsthand as a privilege of being a Google insider.

Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#89

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

peppertree wrote: post #16
josefritzishere wrote: post #3

The galling part of this is that the demand for AI is artificial. Consumers are not demanding AI.

Pretty sure people said the same about fiber internet in the 2000's.

... and they were right, and there was a massive destruction of capital invested in companies that installed dark fiber and went bankrupt. The difference was that the dark fiber then got lit later on, because it was useful physical infrastructure.

The same cannot be said of the present AI boondoggles.

Re: Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

#90

Post by TheGamerUncle »

jeffbee wrote: post #76
alecco wrote: post #8

I don't like 2024 Google, but they seem to be the only ones trying (at least) to make the least impact with their energy consumption. Why aren't there hit pieces like this on the US intelligence massive Utah Data Center? (for example)

It's because the NSA's "massive" datacenter is actually tiny, cannot contain the things that paranoid people think it contains, cannot do the things weirdos imagine it does.

pretty sure lol that what snowden has shown reveals you are quite wrong
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