Artificial intelligence technologies are slowly but surely becoming widespread across the world, at a time when the climate crisis is worsening. environmental effects It raised some questions. The environmental report published yesterday by Google, one of the leading companies in the field of artificial intelligence, also addressed this issue.

Google set a goal of reaching zero emissions by 2030. However, annual data showed that this was not entirely true. So much so that greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 48% since 2019. Last year, with an annual increase of 13% 14.3 million tons of carbon dioxide produced. As you can guess, the main reason for this is technology, which is of great importance for artificial intelligence. data centers happened.

Data center electricity consumption has increased significantly

Data centers are notorious for their high energy demands. The situation is much worse for those training artificial intelligence. Data center electricity consumption will impact a company’s carbon footprint by 2023 added 1 million tons of pollution and played the largest role in last year’s emissions.

Google is currently in the ‘Gemini’ period. It is integrating artificial intelligence into everything from its search engine to all its other services. For this reason, its environmental impact is increasing significantly. According to the report, Google Data center electricity consumption to increase by 17% in 2023The company believes this will continue in the future, adding that its own centres account for 10% of centre consumption worldwide.

The tech giant did not forget that it has plans to minimize these effects. The goal is to develop models for artificial intelligence, hardware and data centers. become more energy efficient bring. We wait to see how he does this. It is a matter of curiosity whether he will achieve his 2030 goals.

Google’s report actually shows us the less talked about side of AI. Considering that many companies are taking steps in the field of AI, we can imagine that their impact on the environment will be incredibly large. According to data from the International Energy Agency (IEA), data centers currently use about 1% of the world’s electricity. However, with the rise of AI, this has increased In 2026 this could increase to 10% It is estimated. In short: urgent action is needed.