How AI is Hogging the Electric Grid

Описание: Tech companies like to present themselves as some of the most climate-friendly corporations in the world. And in some ways, this is actually true. Amazon, Meta and Google were three of the top four corporate buyers of clean energy purchase agreements in 2023. They’d like you to think this cancels out their own electricity usage.

But, as we show in this video, big tech companies are using more electricity than ever thanks to their insatiable demand for data centers to power AI. The AI-driven demand for energy is so high that the companies’ clean energy purchases simply can’t keep up.

Using data from the corporate sustainability reports for seven major tech companies—Google, Amazon, Meta, Netflix, Microsoft, IBM, and Intel—as well as other sources of corporate disclosures and academic studies, we found astronomical increases for electricity usage in recent years. Google’s electricity consumption has increased 186 percent since 2017. Microsoft’s has increased 186 percent as well. Meta’s has increased 367 percent during the same time period.

When it comes to electricity consumption, tech companies often repeat the familiar adage of “The greenest energy is the energy they don’t use.” Unfortunately, they don’t practice what they preach.

Proof reached out to the tech companies mentioned in this video for comment; none provided any comment.

Ingredients:

Hypothesis: Tech companies’ energy use is skyrocketing due to data center expansion and they’re losing ground on their attempt to reduce carbon emissions.

Sample Size: We reviewed individual corporate sustainability reports for 7 major tech companies (Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Netflix, Microsoft, IBM, and Intel) and data from CDP disclosures, a not-for-profit charity that centralizes corporate environmental disclosures as well as a dozen non-tech Fortune 25 companies like Walmart, CVS, Ford, and GM. We also reviewed white papers and other supplemental documentation published by the companies about their mitigation strategies.

Technique: We compared total electricity consumption in gigawatt-hours per year by company going back as long as the company publicly reported such data, typically in mid-to-late 2010s.

Key Findings: Google’s electricity consumption has increased 186 percent since 2017. Microsoft’s has increased 186 percent as well. Meta’s has increased 367 percent. And a smaller share of Google’s data center electricity is powered by clean energy now than in 2020.

Limitations: Google is the only company that reports the percentage of data center electricity powered by green energy. Many companies such as Amazon do not, or have only recently begun, to report electricity use overall. There is no generally accepted method for separating AI-related resource usage within data centers from other computational requirements.

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Sources:

Corporate sustainability reports for:
Google
https://sustainability.google/reports...
Netflix
https://downloads.ctfassets.net/4cd45...
Amazon
https://sustainability.aboutamazon.co...
Meta
https://sustainability.fb.com/2023-su...
Microsoft
https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-is...
IBM
https://www.ibm.com/impact/files/repo...
Intel
https://csrreportbuilder.intel.com/pd...

We used the electricity consumption figures of the average U.S. home from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, a government agency, and Census data on the number of housing units per state.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/u...

Noman Bashir of MIT and his paper on power purchase agreements were sources for understanding how PPA markets work and the climate implications of location and market-based emissions accounting.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03550

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