Can the climate survive the insatiable energy demands of the AI arms race?
New computing infrastructure means big tech is likely to miss emissions targets but they can’t afford to get left behind in a winner takes all market
Dan Milmo,
Alex Hern and
Jillian Ambrose
Thu 4 Jul 2024 15.00 AEST
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The artificial intelligence boom has driven big tech share prices to fresh highs, but at the cost of the sector’s climate aspirations.
Google
admitted on Tuesday that the technology is threatening its environmental targets after revealing that datacentres, a key piece of AI infrastructure, had helped increase its greenhouse gas emissions by 48% since 2019. It said “significant uncertainty” around reaching its target of net zero emissions by 2030 – reducing the overall amount of CO2 emissions it is responsible for to zero – included “the uncertainty around the future environmental impact of AI, which is complex and difficult to predict”.
It follows Microsoft, the biggest financial backer of ChatGPT developer OpenAI,
admitting that its 2030 net zero “moonshot” might not succeed owing to its AI strategy.
So will tech be able to bring down AI’s environmental cost, or will the industry plough on regardless because the prize of supremacy is so great?
Why does AI pose a threat to tech companies’ green goals?
Datacentres are a core component of training and operating AI models such as Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s GPT-4. They contain the sophisticated computing equipment, or servers, that crunch through the vast reams of data underpinning AI systems. They require large amounts of electricity to run, which generates CO2 depending on the energy source, as well as creating “embedded” CO2 from the cost of manufacturing and transporting the necessary equipment.
According to the International Energy Agency, total electricity consumption from datacentres could
double from 2022 levels to 1,000 TWh (terawatt hours) in 2026, equivalent to the energy demand of Japan, while research firm SemiAnalysis calculates that AI will result in datacentres using
4.5% of global energy generation by 2030. Water usage is significant too, 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.
What do experts say about the environmental impact?
A recent UK
government-backed report on AI safety said that the carbon intensity of the energy source used by tech firms is “a key variable” in working out the environmental cost of the technology. It adds, however, that a “significant portion” of AI model training still relies on fossil fuel-powered energy.
Indeed, tech firms are hoovering up renewable energy contracts in an attempt to meet their environmental goals. Amazon, for instance, is the world’s
largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy. Some experts argue, though, that this pushes other energy users into fossil fuels because there is not enough clean energy to go round.
“Energy consumption is not just growing, but Google is also struggling to meet this increased demand from sustainable energy sources,” says Alex de Vries, the founder of Digiconomist, a website monitoring the environmental impact of new technologies.
Is there enough renewable energy to go round?
Global governments plan to
triple the world’s renewable energy resources by the end of the decade to cut consumption of fossil fuels in line with climate targets. But the ambitious pledge, agreed at last year’s COP28 climate talks, is already in doubt and experts fear that a sharp increase in energy demand from AI datacentres may push it further out of reach.
The IEA, the world’s energy watchdog, has warned that even though global renewable energy capacity grew by the fastest pace recorded in the past 20 years in 2023, the world
may only double its renewable energy by 2030 under current government plans.
The answer to AI’s energy appetite may be for tech companies to invest more heavily in building new renewable energy projects to meet their growing power demand.
New computing infrastructure means big tech is likely to miss emissions targets but they can’t afford to get left behind in a winner takes all market
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are part of the ongoing Berlin 6G Conference (July 2 - 4, 2024). While three of the above paper’s co-authors are session chairs or speakers, Yuzhen Ke and Mehdi Heshmati are giving live demos of Spiky Spot’s akidaesque gesture recognition skills at the conference expo.
icc2024.ieee-icc.org
www.linkedin.com
robots.jobs
semiengineering.com
thestockexchange.com.au
) has received funding from the Gates Foundation - $2.69 million over two years.
spectrum.ieee.org
