Ultimately, Google is no longer a carbon neutral company

Due to energy consumption linked to AI, Google thinks again and abandons the goal of becoming carbon neutral.

• Due to the high energy demands of AI technologies, Google has stopped calling itself carbon neutral, aiming for true neutrality by 2030.
• Google's energy consumption has increased 48% since 2019 due to artificial intelligence, even impacting companies like Microsoft.
• Google intends to directly reduce CO2 emissions by abandoning carbon offsets, despite previous investments in sustainability.

Within a few weeks the sector big tech has completely forgotten at least a decade of promises – and investments – in sustainability, sacrificing much in the name of generative artificial intelligence.In the past few weeks we told the enormous electricity - and water - consumption linked to data centers, the data processing centers essential for the web infrastructure but particularly put in difficulty by AI.In fact, to generate a response, especially if it is an image or a video, ChatGpt, MidJourney, Sona and other similar products need a lot of computational power, and therefore energy.

Google stops calling itself "carbon neutral"

Result:second Bloomberg, Google has stopped defining itself as a "carbon neutral" company, promising to become one, or rather to return to being so, by 2030.What happened?Since 2007, Google has boasted carbon neutrality, i.e. the balance between the carbon emissions produced and those that the company itself has somehow reduced, avoided or seized.Specifically, Google succeeded thanks to CO2 offsetting (carbon offset), a series of investments aimed at counterbalancing the emissions produced, for example by planting trees and forests.In 2022 alone, Google offset approximately three million tons of CO2 in these ways.

Google announced the change by specifying that it was "in line with a market undergoing transformation, with a more developed carbon removal ecosystem that we helped catalyze".As a result, “we aim to avoid or reduce greenhouse gas emissions to achieve our absolute emissions reduction target.”

In short, Google will no longer focus on the carbon offset to directly reduce the emissions made by the group.It seems like good news - and the company press release does everything to frame it as such - but the facts speak clearly and seem to tell another story:Google consumes today 48 percent more energy than in 2019 and over the course of these five years its total consumption has doubled.The same goes for Microsoft, another company that has invested heavily in generative AI, also thanks to a strong alliance with OpenAI, which has seen its consumption increase by around 30 percent, again according to Bloomberg.

What will the other big techs do now?

What makes these data even more tragic is the role played by Google in "catalysing" (to use the company's own terms) the ecosystem of companies, services and technologies necessary to offset greenhouse gas emissions, but also to many investments made in sustainable energy, water recycling and even more controversial technologies such as capturing CO2 from the atmosphere.

In 2022, in fact, the group invested 200 million dollars in a fund that did just this.In the report for the current year, Google stated that it has contracted credits for approximately 60 thousand tons of emissions from three companies that deal with carbon capture, a technology that is still experimental and under development, so much so that these credits will be delivered within 2028.Be that as it may, however, this is a tiny part of the emissions produced by Google, which in total exceed 14 million tons.Despite these numbers, however, Google apparently decided it doesn't need to be carbon neutral:better to focus on chatbots.