The company sees more savings ahead, too. The AI now knows where there are gaps in its coverage, and it may tell Google to install more sensors to improve its effectiveness. Software can only do so much to lower the tech giant's power consumption. However, it's a relatively small investment that can pay big dividends, and not just for Google's bottom line -- combined with investments in renewable energy, it could do a lot to help the environment. The results also underscore the sheer flexibility of DeepMind.

Google dramatically cut its energy usage for cooling its datacenters by up to 40%, with the help of its DeepMind artificial intelligence, the company announced Wednesday in a blog post. Alphabet's Google began using machine learning two years ago to save energy and money at its data centers. Over the past few months, Google added artificial intelligence from its DeepMind research and significantly improved on its results. Google was able to cut up to 40% of its energy usage from cooling its data centers and, overall, improve its power usage effectiveness (PUE) by 15%, after accounting for other non-cooling inefficiencies and electrical losses. For Google, its energy reduction results could bode well should it decide to launch something as a source of revenue.

The amount of energy consumed by big data centers has always been a headache for tech companies. Keeping the servers cool as they crunch numbers is such a challenge that Facebook even built one of its facilities on the edge of the Arctic Circle. Well, Google has a different solution to this problem: putting its DeepMind artificial intelligence unit in charge and using AI to manage power usage in parts of its data centers. A 40 percent reduction in the amount of electricity needed for cooling, which Google describes as a "phenomenal step forward." After accounting for "electrical losses and other non-cooling inefficiencies," this 40 percent reduction translated into a 15 percent reduction in overall power saving, says Google.

From smartphone assistants to image recognition and translation, machine learning already helps us in our everyday lives. But it can also help us to tackle some of the world's most challenging physical problems -- such as energy consumption. Large-scale commercial and industrial systems like data centers consume a lot of energy, and while much has been done to stem the growth of energy use, there remains a lot more to do given the world's increasing need for computing power. Google is taking many steps to reduce energy consumptions . Compared to five years ago, Google now get around 3.5 times the computing power out of the same amount of energy.

It's fair to say that Google-owned AI company DeepMind's big push into the health space via data-access collaborations with the UK's National Health Service -- announced with much fanfare in February this year -- has not been running entirely smoothly so far. But there are more regulatory bumps in the road ahead for DeepMind Health. TechCrunch has learned the company won't continue using one of the apps it co-designed with the NHS until the software has been registered as a medical device with the relevant regulatory body, the MHRA. That's especially interesting given that this app, called Streams, has already been used for patient care in multiple NHS hospitals. The Royal Free NHS Trust previously told TechCrunch the app had been used by up to six of its clinicians in three "user tests" in its London hospitals. Which, put another way, means a profit-driven commercial entity has been involved in a real-world test of an unregistered medical device on actual hospital patients.

Google is putting DeepMind's machine learning to work on managing their sprawling data centers' energy usage, and it's is performing like a boss -- the company reports a 15% drop in consumption since the AI took over. Google is undeniably a huge part of western civilization. The company's data servers pretty much handle all of my mail at this point, along with YouTube, social media platforms and much more. But even so, it's easy to forget that the Google we know and interact with every day is just the tip of the iceberg; it relies on huge data servers to process, transfer and store information -- and all this hardware needs a lot of power. So much power, in fact, that the company decided to do something about it.

Is there anything that Google DeepMind can't do? It can defeat Go champions, potentially help those fighting blindness, and now it's helping Google itself to become more environmentally friendly. Bloomberg reported that the technology giant was able to use the artificial intelligence to reduce power consumption in its data centers. According to a blog post, DeepMind was able to help reduce the amount of energy used for cooling by up to 40 percent, which equates to around an overall 15 percent reduction. This is impressive considering Google said it used around 4,402,836 MWh (megawatt-hours) of electricity in 2014. For perspective, that's around what 366,903 US homes use yearly.

Google has finally revealed a commercial use for DeepMind -- a British artificial intelligence company it acquired for over 600 million in 2014. DeepMind made headlines for beating the best human in the world at the notoriously complex board game Go and it's recently started working with hospitals in the UK on a number of healthcare projects but the startup is yet to make any money for Google, until now. Google announced on Wednesday that it has been using a DeepMind-built AI system to control certain parts of its power-hungry data centers over the last few months as it looks to make its vast server farms more environmentally friendly. Last year, a Greenpeace report predicted that the electricity consumption of data centers is set to account for 12% of global electricity consumption by 2017 and companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple have some of the biggest data centers in the world. Google said it has been able to reduce the energy consumption of its data center cooling units -- used to stop Google's self-built servers from overheating -- by as much as 40% with the help of a DeepMind AI system.

Google tapped into the superior intelligence of its DeepMind neural network to find ways to vastly reduce the energy it uses in its data centers, which make up 40% of the worldwide Internet. "This will also help other companies who run on Google's cloud to improve their own energy efficiency," Google said in a blog about the achievement. "While Google is only one of many data center operators in the world, many are not powered by renewable energy as we are." Google has set a goal to eventually power its data centers using 100% renewable energy. Today, the company claims, renewable energy is used for 35% of its power needs.

Google tapped into the superior intelligence of its DeepMind neural network to find ways to vastly reduce the energy it uses in its data centers, which make up 40% of the worldwide Internet. "This will also help other companies who run on Google's cloud to improve their own energy efficiency," Google said in a blog about the achievement. "While Google is only one of many data center operators in the world, many are not powered by renewable energy as we are." Google has set a goal to eventually power its data centers using 100% renewable energy. Today, the company claims, renewable energy is used for 35% of its power needs.