Two years ago, Latitude Media reporter Maeve Allsup wrote that the artificial intelligence boom had a metrics problem. Hyperscalers, nearly two years into making investments in AI, had started acknowledging in their sustainability reporting that the technology would complicate their decarbonization efforts.
However, Maeve wrote at the time, “despite the cumulative hundreds of pages of reporting, the picture of AI’s energy and emissions footprint remains fuzzy and incomplete.” Everyone uses different reporting approaches, and many obfuscated how much energy consumption — and emissions — came specifically from data centers.
Today, the companies are still relying on different metrics and levels of disclosure, but their messaging is coalescing around a single pitch: improving efficiency, even as emissions and energy use soars.
This week, both Google and Amazon released reports that are their clearest yet about the dramatic impact of the AI boom on their sustainability efforts. And for starters, the numbers aren’t good.
According to the latest edition of Google’s environmental report, the company’s total emissions rose 18% in just a year, to roughly 14.5 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. However, that is an adjusted number, dubbed “ambition-based emissions” as opposed to the absolute emissions, which came in at about 19 million tons of CO2e. (The difference has to do primarily with the company’s accounting under the Science Based Targets initiative, which doesn’t include certain Scope 3 emissions.)
