Silicon Valley giants were once the most active advocates and generous funders of clean energy investments, but they may now become the biggest villains in the renewable energy revolution. With the surge in energy demand from artificial intelligence, emissions from large tech companies have skyrocketed, making their ambitious decarbonization goals increasingly out of reach. Tech giants, including Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI, are pushing for greater deployment of renewable energy infrastructure and the development of new clean energy sources, but keeping up with the immense energy demands of AI is a daunting task.
Google's 2024 Environmental Report shows that the company's greenhouse gas emissions have surged nearly 50% since 2019, driven by the massive expansion of AI usage in its operations. As a result, the company now openly acknowledges that its ambitious goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2030 is becoming increasingly challenging—if not impossible.
The BBC recently reported that the computational power required for AI-driven services—which translates to electricity—is significantly higher than that of standard online activities, raising a series of warnings about the environmental impact of this technology. A study published earlier this year by scientists at Cornell University found that generative AI systems like ChatGPT consume 33 times more energy than standard computers running specific task software, and each AI-driven internet query (such as a Google search) consumes about ten times the energy of a traditional query. Moreover, AI is quickly becoming the norm.
Consequently, the energy needed to sustain the growth of the AI industry doubles approximately every 100 days. At this rate, by 2030, the AI industry itself could account for up to 3.5% of global energy consumption, according to some experts' predictions. "When you see these numbers, it's staggering," Jason Shaw, chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission, told The Washington Post earlier this year. "It makes you scratch your head and wonder how we got into this situation. How can the predictions be so outrageous? This is an unprecedented challenge for us."
To counter the runaway energy consumption of AI, large tech companies are backing clean energy alternatives that have yet to be fully explored and developed, such as nuclear fusion, nuclear fission, and geothermal energy. Geothermal energy has recently become a much more viable option for all terrains due to drilling technologies borrowed from the fracking industry, making it a popular choice.
Meta and Alphabet are among the major tech companies collaborating with geothermal startups to power data centers. Geothermal companies are emerging across the United States, particularly in Texas, as noted by Matt Welch of the Texas Geothermal Energy Alliance (TxGEA), due to "the abundance of identified geothermal resources, a one-stop shopping permitting process, and our regulatory certainty."
While geothermal energy offers nearly unlimited clean energy and relatively low operating costs, the upfront costs of developing geothermal resources are quite substantial. "This has dampened some of the initial enthusiasm, and investments to date have been limited," Reuters recently reported. "Analysts estimate that total investment in geothermal projects has been just over $700 million since 2020," the report added.
Key Points:
🔋 The surge in AI energy demand leads to increased emissions from major tech companies.
🌐 Companies like Google are driving the deployment of renewable energy infrastructure and the development of new clean energy sources.
🌋 Geothermal energy is becoming a new option for tech companies to address AI energy consumption.
