Last week, Google published a report that set off several alarms by announcing that its polluting emissions have grown substantially as a result of the rise of Artificial Intelligence.
And it’s not just about the carbon footprint: it is estimated that this new technologywhich requires approximately 9 liters of water per kilowatt-hour, could be consuming almost half of the water used by the population of England by 2027.
What is the true environmental cost of our fascination with technology?
In its latest environmental report, Google recognized that its emissions greenhouse gases have increased 48% in the last five years.
The company explained that the electricity consumption of the data centers and the emissions of the supply chain were the main cause of this increase and that in 2023 alone emissions grew by 13% compared to the previous year.
This difference is due to the increasingly growing use of Artificial Intelligence tools.
The Mountain View giant is not the only one that began to open up about this problem: at the last meeting of the Davos forum, Sam Altman -the CEO of OpenIA, the company that developed ChatGPT- spoke about the topic for the first time in public about it and recognized that the next generation of Generative Artificial Intelligence systems It will consume much more energy than expected.
“We need to find new solutions,” Altman said. However, these responses do not seem to come from a change in our habits but in the way in which energy is produced. It is no coincidence that the CEO is also a shareholder of Helion Energya start up which seeks to design smaller, safer nuclear fusion reactors.
But the most optimistic estimate of Helion is that by 2029 it will produce enough energy to supply 40,000 average American homes while today ChatGPT uses the energy of 33,000 homes daily, are we heading towards a world with hundreds of nuclear reactors?
Microsoft founder Bill Gates thinks so. Our passion for artificial intelligence only deepened an already worrying panorama.
As researcher Arthur Holland Michel explained: “Every time we make a new video, send an email, or post a photo of our last meal, it’s like turn on a little light bulb that will never go out”.
That video we uploaded on Instagram ten years ago may not receive views for months but it continues to occupy a place on a server somewhere in the world, consuming our resources.
With the new figures published, Google was far from its goal of reaching zero emissions by 2030, but for now it maintains the goal, recognizing that the main challenge is “the uncertainty that exists around the future environmental impact of AI, which is complex and difficult to predict.”
Fortunately, The future is not written and we can still change it. But it will require not only changes in our behavior but also a greater commitment from companies and state regulation.
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