Google's greenhouse gas emissions jumped nearly 50 percent in five years, thanks in part to its artificial intelligence data center buildout.
In its annual environmental report, the company said that 2023 emissions rose 13 percent compared with the previous year and 48 percent over five years, for a total of 14.3 million metric tons of total carbon dioxide.
The increase in emissions highlighted "the challenge of reducing emissions while compute intensity increases and we grow our technical infrastructure investment to support this AI transition," the report said.
"In 2023, our total data center electricity consumption grew 17 percent, despite maintaining a 100 percent global renewable energy match."
The IEA estimates that global data center electricity consumption is 240–340TWh, or around 1–1.3 percent of global final electricity demand (approximately 25,000TWh).
"In 2023, Google’s data centers consumed 24TWh of electricity, translating to 7-10 percent of the estimated 240–340TWh consumed by data centers globally, and less than 0.1 percent of the estimated 25,000TWh of total global electricity," the report said.
Along with electricity usage, Google purchases vast quantities of diesel for data center backup power, which can lead to significant emissions. "One solution is renewable diesel, which offers lower life cycle carbon emissions compared to fossil fuels. In 2023, we piloted renewable diesel in select US and European data centers, and plan to scale this program globally as renewable diesel availability increases."
Water usage at Google's data centers and offices also increased 17 percent over last year due to the "expansion of AI products and services [which] is leading to an increase in data center workloads and the associated water footprint required to cool them efficiently."
The company added: "To put this into perspective, in 2023 our data centers used the same amount of water needed to irrigate roughly 41 golf courses annually, on average, in the southwestern United States."
Across data centers and offices, total water consumption was 6.4 billion gallons (approximately 24bn liters or 24m cubic meters). In 2023, 69 percent of the company's freshwater withdrawals came from watersheds with low water scarcity, 16 percent came from watersheds with medium water scarcity, and 15 percent came from watersheds with high water scarcity.
In 2023, 22 percent of Google's total data center water withdrawal (excluding seawater) was reclaimed wastewater and other non-potable water, and roughly one-third of the company's data center campuses used air cooling or non-potable water sources.
The company's data centers in Singapore and in Douglas County, Georgia, used reclaimed water. Google's data centers in St. Ghislain, Belgium, Changhua County, Taiwan, and Eemshaven, Netherlands, use industrial water. In Hamina, Finland, Google used seawater to cool its data center.
The company last year announced a water risk framework to evaluate data center sites. "This framework is already informing our cooling technology selection," the report said.
"For example, our new data center campuses under development in Mesa, Arizona, and Canelones, Uruguay, will use air-cooling technology because the source watersheds didn’t meet our responsible use threshold for water cooling. And we already employ air-cooling technology at our data centers in Storey County, Nevada, and Dublin, Ireland."
Google also said that it diverted 78 percent of operational waste from disposal across its global fleet of Google-owned and -operated data centers, and 29 percent of its data centers met its Zero Waste to Landfill goal.
Since 2015, the company resold more than 44 million hardware components from its data centers into the secondary market for reuse by other organizations, including more than seven million resold components in 2023.
"In spite of the progress we're making, we face significant challenges that we’re actively working through," Google said. "A sustainable future requires systems-level change, strong government policies, and new technologies."
