The Morning After: Google's greenhouse gas emissions climbed nearly 50 percent in five years due to AI

Google's greenhouse gas emissions spiked by nearly 50 percent in the last five years, due to data centers required to power artificial intelligence, according to the company's 2024 Environmental Report. The report shows the company's progress towards meeting its self-proclaimed objective of becoming carbon neutral by 2030 – despite this additional challenge. Using AI features (let alone training the models) uses a lot of energy. In 2023, researchers at AI startup Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University found that generating a single image using artificial intelligence can use as much energy as charging a smartphone. Google has a lot of AI projects on the go.