www.bbc.com/news/articles/c51yvz51k2xo
AI means Google's greenhouse gas emissions up 48% in 5 years
That's just what a bot would say
I've been exposed
It's self aware, get it!
Why don’t pictures like this trend?
This isn't much of a surprise when years ago they reported on how much green house gasses were being created by crypto farming and the same nividia tech powers both ventures.
The International Energy Agency estimates that data centres’ total electricity consumption could double from 2022 levels to 1,000TWh (terawatt hours) in 2026, approximately Japan’s level of electricity demand. AI will result in data centres using 4.5% of global energy generation by 2030, according to calculations by research firm SemiAnalysis.
Water usage is another environmental factor in the AI boom, with one study estimating that AI could account for up to 6.6bn cubic metres of water use by 2027 – nearly two-thirds of England’s annual consumption.
My cousin does maintenance at a data center for a huge credit card company. It’s basically a big warehouse full of servers. He was showing me pictures of their cooling system with chillers and their water tower and it was much much larger than one at my facility that uses chilled water in our process. He said they use hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day through their evaporators.
I want to say, that is why I believe Microsoft is investing in the Project Natick, where they are making datacenters at the bottom of the ocean fully surrounded by cold water. I figure there though is, we have all this cold water around us, we mine as well put it to some use.
Edit: Did a bit of research and it seems even Microsoft has decided to shut that project down just last month. Even though it worked and functioned as intended, they decided to venture elsewhere.
That’s not a bad idea. I’m working on a project now to recycle our waste water (not poop water) to get it clean enough to use in our water tower. Would save about 150,000 gallons of water a day. But we are not in a water scarce area. We are a river city that has a few billion gallons of water that flows through our city every minute.
From what I read on the project, it worked very well and exceeded beyond all expectations. More or less, Microsoft proved that you can house data centers at the bottom of the ocean with no human interaction and they can function properly. They've since shelved the project announcing it last month that they did but does show we can use the ocean to have eco-friendlier datacenters.
After the initial pilot, Project Natick reached what Microsoft called "Phase 2" in 2018. This time, the company subjected the datacenter to harsher conditions, submerging it under the choppy waters off the coast of Scotland. The Phase 2 datacenter was several orders of magnitude more powerful than Phase 1, the equivalent of several thousand PCs.
Microsoft retrieved the Phase 2 datacenter in 2020, deeming it a success: After two years of zero human intervention, the datacenter experienced only "a handful" of failed servers and cables. At the time, the results suggested to Microsoft that servers in underwater datacenters could be up to eight times more reliable than non-submerged servers.
That’s interesting. But I’d think it would be difficult to build a large structure underwater. But I’m no underwater engineer. In my city we are making a flood tunnel to capture rainwater and poop water from overflowing sewers during rain events. To do this, they essentially made a several miles long subway tunnel a few hundred feet beneath the city in solid bedrock.
I’d think they would be able, with modern directional drilling like for oil and gas pipelines to build an on-shore facility, and drill a pipeline from there to the ocean to cycle in cold water and return it as non-contact cooling water that’s a bit warmer. Especially on the west coast where it’s steeper and deeper and the pacific is much colder.
And shit, think about a place like the Bahamas where just off-shore there’s a thousands of feet deep trench that would have very cold water.
I think at some point computer companies are going to have to look into the use of natural bodies of cold water that we can use to our advantage. With our modern and future society pushing forward into a work where AI, Cloud, and Crypto big factors in our digital life, those things are going to take a lot of energy and produce a ton of heat.
I feel something is going to have to come about in order to solve the issues we may face.
Yep, and even more and greener electricity only reduces carbon footprint, it doesn’t take care of the strain on the electric grid.
Ah yes, what could go wrong with impacting our earth's biggest natural heat sink?
Although I'm pretty sure they recycle like 99% of it. No reason to let it escape the cycle.
Nah it’s evaporated up into the sky. The circulated chilled water is recycled, and some systems use glycol. But the cooling towers work from evaporative cooling to bleed off the heat.
I am glad we are coming up with new and entertaining ways of shoving our planet out of the "Habitable" phase of its life.
And just like crypto all of this power is being used for literally no benefit or gain other than finding new ways to monetize your digital existence
You can argue that generative AI actually does net harm to the internet by flooding the tubes with mass produced shit.
It's doing net harm to the whole world at the moment
Google is getting less useful by the day as endless amounts of generative AI content floods the internet
You think it's doing harm now, watch in a couple of months
Capitalism is a death cult.
I'm so sick of seeing this shitty take on AI. It's an incredibly useful tool that's being used for lots of really cool things. It's not even in the same ballpark as crypto (and nfts like some people say)
What are the cool things it’s being used for? All I’m seeing it do is make shitty images, write emails people won’t read, and answer support questions incorrectly.
Not a fan of generative ai but these are actually pretty neat. Thanks for sharing them. Science/medicine is a much better use of this technology than making images of buxom white women with wrong fingers.
What about the facial/thumbprint recognition used to unlock phones? Number plate recognition system? There's a whole plethora of research in medical imaging which is being used to help diagnose real patient medical issues. And much much more. Yet since generative ai is the thing in the media so people think that's all there is
Yeah social media has become an anti-intellectual shitpile of anti-AI fuckholes with no logic or reasoning skills who are blatantly unaware of the current state of AI and its plethora of legit uses.
This post itself is bullshit. Datacenters have existed for decades and they are growing in number exponentially every year. Generative tech is just a drop in the bucket compared to normal everyday computer usage.
Now for the inevitable AI powered/generated crypto fad. Ugly waxy looking AI NFT's.
Weren't a lot of NFTs AI generated anyway?
At least AI has some use
Not with the way Google has been using it, Gemini is garbage compared to every other AI
Yeah. Only it's use is negative on society. Just increased amount of bots, spam and predatory articles x1000.
I sincerely believe 1000x is a massive understatement
In every application? No it doesn't
What kind of straw man argument is this? My point is genAI today is infinitely more useful than crypto, regardless whether it is unnecessary in certain applications
It's not a strawman. I didn't realize you were saying [compared to crypto] AI has some use. I am speaking to the company we're discussing forcing AI into places no one wants it and it doesn't function as a replacement to their existing applications.
The consumer grade AI stuff is just the tip of the iceberg, it's like saying NASA only is good for developing lasers.
The consumer stuff is the issue. Most people don't want it. Why aren't AI companies focusing on the actually meaningful uses for AI like medical and scientific applications instead of search engines that are useless, nonsensical articles, and garbage JPEGs?
consumer stuff
What is this to you?
Most people
Yeah I'm sure you know.
Why aren't AI companies focusing on the actually meaningful uses for AI like medical and scientific applications
They are, on a massive scale, and breakthroughs in science and medicine have increased dramatically with the help of AI technologies.
search engines that are useless
You mean Google's shitty search buggery? No one disagrees that it's shite, but that's Google and it's not important... in terms of what AI is being used for. Google's LLM is not the only and nowhere near the best of them.
nonsensical articles
Shitty nonsense has been around forever. People are gullible and stupid. Generative AI is not responsible for that.
garbage JPEGs
None of the generative AI text2image techs even produce jpgs. It's all uncompressed pngs. Again that's not the AIs fault at all.
You sound angry. At the wrong things.
What tool has been held to this standard before??
"Does this hammer write good poems?? Guess it's a bad hammer!"
The planet will become inhospitable that much sooner, but at least we know we have to eat one rock a day.
We can keep getting that much needed iron.
It keeps the chirurgeon away,
When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money.
And somehow that burden will probably get pushed onto the consumer. Why do we even need AI in so many unnecessary facets of our lives? Google has became horrible to search for anything since adding it.
Sure, in the medical field it is very useful, but pretty much everywhere else it’s not necessary.
Doctor here. AI has no concrete benefits for me at this time. Maybe in the future but it’s yet to be shown.
Lab tech here. I would love an automated hematology differential system that is better at telling the difference between reactive lymphocytes and monocytes so I can make fewer manual smears. AI could conceivably contribute to that. But most applications of it are BS.
because people like to pretend its sentient when its not. you can ask chat-gpt 4o to browse the web and source stuff, and itll still get stuff wrong based on the sources it gives you. it doesnt understand anything, its just trying to form what it thinks is a legible sentence.
Buckle up for when people start coming to you, not with things they read in a book and got nervous about, but with shit AI told them their symptoms match :)
It's already happening, trust me.
Google literally already does this. I know people who’s self diagnosis sheet is the length of a full google search list
I suspect it'll eventually be invaluable for diagnosis, like being able to read test results and imaging a lot faster and more accurate than any human can, but I wouldn't trust it without human involvement currently.
Administrative and dispatching roles are other places it'll really shine.
I use it for coding, it's really nice for automating repetitive tasks, I also use it as place to "take notes", musing to it and seeing what kind of stuff it'll spit out back at me. Too dumb to write entire programs, but smart enough to predict what you're typing.
I know a guy working on literally this right now. He can't say much, but the AI scans test results and patient reports, and generates a preliminary set of potential things for the doctor to look into.
The catch is that it's a preliminary report only the doctor sees, and it's meant to be examined very closely and used more as a quick set of ideas to fix what's wrong. In theory, the AI is supposed to make the doctors job easier on most things, while still allowing the doc to make the final call.
From a physician perspective this concerns me. I can easily imagine a hospital system emplying an AI which is capable of “seeing” far more patients per day than any physician could. The physicians will be tasked with reviewing the cases which will generally be correct, thus mind-numbingly boring. The temptation to rubber stamp them as correct would be high. Also, for this to be profitable, it will have to replace the jobs of one or more physicians which means fewer physicians treating more patients. This seems like a recipe for incorrect treatments to slip through.
Meanwhile there's a chief of medicine happy to pay for the subscription and pile the "final call" onto one doctor and bill the customer... I mean patient... More for this new tech!
Gotta think about that bottom line.
This is the best possible scenario, but I can't help but wonder how many years of tech bros pushing 'this AI can diagnose your cancer!' we'll have to endure before then.
Because most "AI" isn't AI. It's just fancy if/then/else conditions. It's the current buzz word and yes it absolutely sucks. I really hope it flops and we stop shoving it into everything.
The lasting legacy will likely just be dumping the Internet with unfathomable amounts of misinformation, fake pics/videos, and stolen data exponentially more so that it already is
Yes but the "AI" these data centers are processing is AI.You're talking about the "AI" in your microwave.
As someone who works in both graphic design (profession) and programming (hobby) I can tell you that AI has made things so much better. The problem is, right now the majority of the population uses it for pointless things such as creating funny images or asking dumb questions.
Is it perfect? No. It's still in development. However, if you know what you're doing, spend enough time learning how to word things so you get the desired result and understanding that it is not perfect, it becomes a very valuable and versatile tool.
I've used it to write code. But I had to modify it A LOT before it could go into production. It got me started, and gave me the right path to go down....but it certainly didn't produce usable code.
I get where you’re coming from. But it’s a guarantee that whatever AI service we’re using is ran on AWS or Google Cloud Compute. Maybe even a combination of the two.
So like the medical field, Defense industry, etc or counting against that percentage
There’s now AI powered recycling facilities that are much more accurate and quick in picking trash than humans and agricultural sprayers that reduces pesticide use by 70%. The shit is really necessary everywhere
These AI data centers can use up to 400 megawatts. A unit at a nuclear power plant produces on average 800-1200 megawatts.
And guess what....we are building data centers everywhere and aren't building any new nuclear power plants.
You mean we can't just import those from China?
We are totally screwed - no company takes climate change seriously, whatever they say.
Maybe there should be a law?
There is one, Citizen’s United, and it says as long as they have money they can do whatever they want. Basically.
That’s not a law it’s a ridiculous interpretation of the first amendment by SCOTUS that struck down a law regulating campaign donations
User deleted comment
3d
The amount of impact an individual can have through personal responsibility on climate change is essentially nothing.
The average person in the US emits about 16 tons of CO2 per year. Just this past year, Google emitted 1.7 million tons more. If you as an individual stopped emitting CO2 entirely it would take you 100,000 years to offset the difference in emissions Google emitted in the past year.
This is not how much they emit annually.. this is how much more they emitted from 2023-2024 compared to 2022-2023. They emitted another 12.7 million tonnes on top of that.
Google intends to combat this by buying "carbon credits". Essentially, Google are not changing their habits, they are paying off their obligations.
The only way to combat climate change is at a systemic level.
And no, buying EVs won't help. EVs are too expensive for most consumers right now and the executive order adding 100% tariffs to cheap chinese EVs to protect US automakers who have been asleep at the wheel don't do anything to help that. But even if every single American switched to EVs.
Last year there were 288 million registered vehicles in the US. Let's do some very rough math. Let's assume every one of these vehicles get 25.4 mpg and are all gas - some of them are electric, some hybrid, and most are certainly less efficient than that, so this is more to get a sense of scale than be accurate. The average American drives 12,000 miles per year, and gasoline on average emits 8.8kg of CO2 per gallon. So, you're looking at 288 million x (12000 / 25.4) * 8.8, or 1,283,191,950 tonnes of CO2 for all vehicles on the road. ZEVS (not hybrids) emit around 200 grams of CO2 per mile they drive, working out to be around 2.4kg per year, or 691,200,000 tonnes of CO2.
If every vehicle in the US switched from gasoline to BEV overnight, in the US we'd emit about 591 million fewer tonnes of CO2 per year. This is about 39 Googles. 300 million americans would have as much impact as 39 Googles. And that's with a lot of favorable assumptions towards gasoline cars, assuming we had enough materials to make the lithium ion batteries used in EVs, oil and gas production for vehicles ceased overnight etc. This doesn't consider reduced demand for oil/gasoline, so the numbers are likely more in favor, but I hope it demonstrates that even with a herculean amount of personal responsibility, it's still easily outdone by corporations with all the money in the world to do more than they do.
Oh, and then you consider that consumer transportation is only about 15% of US emissions (Transportation is 30% of emissions, consumer transportation just over half that).
More people absolutely should switch to hybrid or EVs if they can as they are significantly more efficient, but it's simply not enough. there needs to be a systemic push to reduce the US' reliance on both home-grown and imported gasoline and oil, not just in the transportation sector, but in our power grid. 61% of all CO2 emissions in the united states are sourced from commercial industry and residential homes, with a significant portion of that being down to the power grid itself.
The biggest impact an individual can have is to take direct political action to ensure that agencies like the EPA don't get defunded and policitians that are pro-environment legislation are elected. In practice, this means voting for Democrats, or running for office yourself. The next best thing would probably be to get solar panels to offset your home emissions (which has added benefits like reducing your bills), battery storage, and then and only then an EV. The most efficient car you can drive when you consider total cost to the environment is probably the one you already have as manufacturing EVs is not emissions free either. But, if youre in the market to buy a new car, an EV would be a great choice.
All these data centers need 24/7 air conditioning. Exacerbating the energy expense.
Young people looking for a career should think about HVAC.
Actually, depending on the location, many newer well designed data centers can operate over half the year on average with free air cooling using outside air as the primary source of cooling. Still have to get all the heat generated by the IT equipment etc. out of the data hall though, so those air handlers will always be a constant.
Good to see that people are looking for better ways to do it. I might still be under the assumption of how things were done 20 years ago.
Industry average PUE (total energy/IT energy) values have more than halved in the past decade in the US. A lot of progress. Honestly at this point the IT equipment efficiency itself is a bigger issue than HVAC efficiency going forward.
Large tech companies are probably some of the best at trying to improve this not just for green points but because electricity costs them a lot of money. And due to centralization of the energy use at data centers (as opposed to other businesses that have energy use more spread out) they can track how much it costs them and how much they save with greener designs.
Remember “Don’t Be Evil”? Good times.
Yeah but think of all the images that no one likes that we can see
User deleted comment
3d
That was Zuckerberg…
That’s why Amazon just bought a nuclear powered data center in PA.
And the US just got rid of environmental laws to guarantee the next generation will live in hell.
What environmental laws did the US get rid of? I know there was a supreme Court thing but I thought that was about limiting the exec Branch's ability to fight climate change without laws
The Chevron ruling basically puts them in a position to gut all EPA enforcement. Much more insidious than targeting any particular law.
To be brief, what the Supreme Court did was to say that, when Congress passes a law that says, "[agency] shall regulate [practices] to achieve [goal]," they don't really want the agency to make the decisions about just what regulations are required. Sure the agency consists almost exclusively of subject matter experts who have the best possible understanding of what needs to be done, but that's not the point. No, what's going to happen from now on is that the courts are going to guess at how many parts per million of chlorohexatoluene (made up name) Congress was secretly envisioning when they said "clean water", and then whatever the courts decide is the "single best meaning" goes.
Now, understand that huge numbers of laws for dealing with complex topics are written exactly that way. Sure you can write one law against murder and be done with it, but with new chemicals, new industrial processes, and new safety features coming out every year, with animal populations growing and declining, and on and on the list goes, you would need to be writing thousands of laws per year to keep up, all of them highly technical and requiring a level of expertise that Congress absolutely does not have. The actual case here dealt with fishery management, Congress is definitely not going to be able to pass a new law setting a harvesting limit for every fish species in every region every year. The regulation process is just the only thing that makes sense. And the Supreme Court threw it out.
Thanks Google. I appreciate you ferrying humanity across the river stix for profit. Cheers 🖕
It might even be dumber than that. Last I heard, tech companies were losing money from AI. Because no one really knows how to monetize it. They're destroying the environment and spending millions of dollars doing it because maybe, somehow, in the future, they will find a way to make money off of this.
It's just trend chasing, the market has no idea why it wants anything, just vibes and so then companies throw together how they can implement the hottest trend. It was block chain 2 years ago, it's AI right now, I'm sure algae bloom based lighting will be up soon.
They have an AI subscription option for enterprise accounts already
just to be clear, Google's annual emissions are like 1% of passenger aircraft emissions. And most of Google's emissions are not from search but from their hardware side of things. And google claims to offset 100% of all emissions (controversial if such a thing is possible)
The problem is that AI is beloved by all and such a useful tool that Google has no choice but to use it.
I feel like I really don't have to do the whole /s thing, but this being the internet and all...
‘But it’s okay because AI will help us figure out how to solve the problem’
—Bill Gates
"Kill all humans" - AI
what exactly did google change that takes so much electricity? their search sure hasn't improved
They are powering the AI that summarizes searches so that you don't have to click to the source, but can't tell good information from bad. I am missing the Yahoo directory.
I don't want to be cynical or negative, but God damn. I feel like the battle against greed and the destruction of the planet and precious life is unstoppable and passed the point of no return. I don't think this will ever stop. That the guilty parties will be held accountable.
Is there any hope at all?
I mean, in terms of media production, it's still going to be a million times less greenhouse-gas-and-material-waste heavy to generate a minute of footage with AI than to film the same minute in live action with even a small crew, ie. driving all the equipment to a set or scouted location, powering the site with generators for eight hours, having heating or cooling tents, surplus craft table food and packaging, the building, buying and scrapping of all the decor and props, and then dismantling and driving everything home at the end of the day.
so much processing power for so little of value
Demands are always going to increase over time. Fix the grid.
Clean power generation will allow us to use more power with fewer greenhouse gases.
The world would be better off without Google.
All this energy consumption to enshittify the internet. Cool.
I wonder what percentage of what AI is used for is basically pointless/can be done with a google search.
Despite all the hype about this being an AI problem and “AI datacenters”, the AI part isn’t really the power hog. If you take every H100 that Nvidia is projected to sell in 2024 and turned them on at the same time, they would draw roughly 1.4 gigawatts of power. That’s definitely a very large amount, but total global data center power consumption is sitting right around 7.4 gigawatts. So while the GPUs themselves are a meaningful fraction of that whole, they are not by any means the majority contributor.
I literally spec and build these types of facilities as part of my day job, and the largest power draw is usually storage and CPU, since you end up having a lot more CPUs than GPUs, and much much much more storage of various forms. If I were to make an educated guess, I would say that most of the reason Google is expanding their DC footprint so much has more to do with data and networking capacity than it has to do with GPUs or TPUs. So, indirectly relevant to AI, but also relevant to literally every other part of their business.
Don’t fall for the clickbait.
I thought that DC (Nova) was the place to expand into because the defense and intelligence community are probably some of the largest customers of these data centers.
the northern Virginia datacenter corridor is massive. but the best data center location depends greatly on your use case. Balancing latency, energy, cost, disasters, local hiring pool, etc.
And nobody wants or asked for this garbage. Ban non scientific ai usage.
Google, like everyone else, has been building more data centers which is probably where the emissions are coming from. However despite emissions going up, I would say that we are also getting more processing power out of that emission as well since chips are becoming more energy efficient as well.
hey but at least no one fucking wants it and it doesn't fucking work
Imagine! All that power being used so that Google can tell people to cook pasta with gasoline!
Oh good, 48% more greenhouse gasses to tell us to put glue on pizza.
There are so many reasons to just shut it all down.
AI - here to do what people already do, but worse. Call now to ruin your product and discredit you as a professional.
tech bros destroying the planet as always
So far AI has underwhelmed me
Dope, killing the planet for a magical get the wrong answer machine
all this just so they can make artists starve harder
These data centers will become targets for the rebellion once skyn... err Google Life is launched and takes over
Tell me more about how AI is going to make everything better. These stupid corporate assholes.
And the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. What they’re calling “AI” is 90% hype, and the other useful 10% is nothing we couldn’t have lived without back in say, 2017.
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4d
You’re missing the point. Obviously needs go up, but ai and crypto mining (tasks that require extreme computer processing) have an unprecedented need for electricity. Your need for electricity going up 50% in 5 years isn’t sustainable to “fix the grid”. Upgrading electric grids takes 10+ years and billions of dollars
Yeah let’s cook the planet so a million Facebook posts can have shitty pictures asking why no one is sharing them.
User deleted comment
4d
I'm concerned that you're using the phrase 'the grid' in a different way then it is colloquially used. Though, either way, your response seems to be a bit of a non-sequitur.
Of course the article doesn't say what it rose 48% from. Google is actually a very environmentally conscious company, and they do a lot of projects. So 48% just because they started ai research , says a lot about how much they're doing to keep that number where it is.
The point is, we're all supposed to be reducing emissions, not increasing them. I seriously doubt Google has reduced its other emissions by 48% to compensate.
The article literally points out that 2/3 of Google is powered by carbon-free sources
So 48% just because they started ai research
So when they exit the "research" phase and start scaling this thing up to its eventual final size, its rate of power consumption will....what? Go down?
But AI is pointless.
Because you only know it as chatbots and art generators. There's a whole lot more it does that some people wouldn't be able to live without
That seems unlikely given we've lived without it until now.
We’ve lived without every modern technology now. I’m worried that we won’t have AI legislation in the near future but I recognize it as a great research tool lots of things, including discovering new drugs and materials.
AI has massively helped research becasue you just slap AI on your project and the money tap opens lol.
Unless someone has cancer
My stepmother died from cancer becasue she couldn't afford private treatment and the NHS waiting list was too long. Diagnosis wasn't the problem, getting care was.
How is your AI going to help with that?
While the person above is being perhaps a bit hyperbolic about immediate applications, you could've said this about the Haber process.
Theres's a couple of areas that (generative) AI has been helpful in:
- Protein folding has seen success and de novo protein synthesis is an ongoing area of research
- Weather forecasting
- Proof assistants
- Materials science
There's plenty of scenarios where being mostly correct is perfectly acceptable, especially when we check it in ensemble methods. That's not even going into ML as a whole where models for segmentation of tumors and what not are being productionized and we are getting better at classification/segmentation in general.
That's a ridiculous thing to say.
You'll be saying it next year, it's nearly run it's course, just like crypto, 3d printing and VR before it. These technologies find their use and then fade from view, barely fulfilling a 10th of the promises they arrived with.
Each time it's all this noise about how traditional manufacturing is dead and everyone will have a 3d printer in their home. Or how VR is the next big thing, that everyone will own a headset, or that finance is dead and everyone will use crypto.
It's just hype.
Comparing AI to crypto is so completely foolish. AI might be in a bubble, and it can still be incredibly useful, both can be true.
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Thank God we're using AI to generate women with 3 heads for Facebook engagement of other bots