Google aims to ensure that their carbon footprint, i.e. the pollution produced from their use of electricity, is zero by 2030.
That plan seems to be facing issues as their latest environmental report shows that the company's total carbon footprint (carbon dioxide gas produced) has increased by 48% since 2019.
In fact, according to the same report, Google has shown an increase in its carbon footprint for several years now, where the increase from year to year is as much as 13 percent. Google is seen to be using sustainable energy sources where they can use them, but in regions like Asia Pacific, their data centers use a lot of unsustainable electricity, and this is the reason given for the increased carbon footprint.
In the meantime, the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology also sees Google using more server machines to process their machine learning and AI services, and the increased electricity consumption due to this technology is not something new.
Companies such as Amazon and Microsoft have also all added processing power to their data centers specifically for AI purposes, and for the next few years, the trend of using AI technology will increase, and this issue of large-scale electricity consumption will become more and more serious.