AI Datacenters Alleged to Be More Than 600%

Worse for the Environment Than Tech Companies

 

 

With their actual emissions, these corporations would be the 33rd largest emitters in the world if they were a single nation.

It’s possible that the energy expenses tech corporations have made public regarding the creation of massive AI models have been greatly exaggerated. Or, from your angle, you could say they misled you.

According to The Guardian, the real emissions from data centers controlled by major players in artificial intelligence, such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Meta, are roughly 662 percent greater than their official reports.

The newspaper’s investigation was restricted to emissions made between 2020 and 2022, which only catches the beginning of the AI boom rather than the startling heights that it has now reached. This could only be the tip of the iceberg.
Amazon was by far the biggest emitter overall, according to the analysis, but data center-specific emissions were unavailable, thus it was excluded from the above statistic.

Nevertheless, it has the same blame as everyone else for hiding its environmental damage. The Guardian reminds out that all five of the IT corporations have foolishly claimed to be carbon neutral at different times.
A spokesperson of the campaign group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice told the newspaper, “It comes down to creative accounting.”

When you see “market-based” emissions on an emissions report from a tech business, those emissions are suppressed through the purchase of energy certificates, or “Recs,” which the company then adds into their calculations.

These ostensibly attest to the fact that a business is using an equal amount of renewable energy to offset its usage of dirty energy. It’s important to remember that the company receiving the certificates need not be the one conducting the renewable efforts. Conveniently, the task of producing the renewables can be handled by a third entity they pay, right?

Any of these tech companies can buy Recs, and in practice little is done to verify how much is actually being “offset.” Basically, it’s like money laundering except for an energy bill.

And as the report shows, even if the offsetting is taking place, the ulterior motive almost certainly isn’t to save trees, but to shave off a few zeroes on a carbon balance sheet, all so we can go on pretending this stuff isn’t gutting the environment.

Instead, a truer reflection of the actual toll would be “location-based emissions.” No nonsense here: it’s the amount emitted by each data center, straight up.

Bear in mind that all the firms don’t report specific data center related emissions the same way. But using the location-based emissions that are available, the biggest liar of the bunch appears to be Meta.
In 2022, Meta’s official emissions from in-house data centers was just 273 metric tons of CO2. But using location-based data, that soars to 3.8 million metric tons a 19,000 times increase, in case you were wondering.

Microsoft is likely more representative of a big AI company’s environmental toll today. Officially, it claimed its data center-related emissions for that year was 280,782 metric tons. The location-based figure? 6.1 million.
We’d like to say there’s a silver lining, but there probably isn’t. By all accounts, AI’s energy demand is going to keep growing.

“The trend in those emissions is worrying,” the report reads. “If these five companies were one country, the sum of their ‘location-based‘ emissions in 2022 would rank them as the 33rd highest-emitting country, behind the Philippines and above Algeria.”