Google Emissions Rise 51% as AI Data Centers Boost Electricity Demand

Google's carbon emissions have increased by 51% since 2019, driven largely by the rising energy demands of artificial intelligence technologies like Gemini and GPT-4, despite efforts to reduce emissions from data centers by 12%. The company’s electricity consumption has grown by 27% year-over-year due to expanding data center capacity, complicating its goal to halve emissions by 2030. While Google has made significant investments in clean energy, including an 8-gigawatt procurement in 2024 and increasing its carbon-free energy use to 66%, it faces challenges from slow deployment of new low-carbon technologies like Small Modular Reactors. AI's rapid evolution is causing unpredictable and potentially nonlinear growth in energy demand, making future emissions trajectories difficult to forecast. Although Google continues to optimize energy efficiency through innovations in data center infrastructure and AI hardware, Scope 3 emissions from supply chain activities remain a major hurdle. The company acknowledges that external factors such as changing climate policies and energy market limitations require flexibility in its sustainability strategies.