Modern technology, especially data centers owned by technology companies will typically consume a lot of electricity and water needed to cool these server machines. It is also seen that with the empowerment of AI technology, energy consumption in these data centers will further increase.
Recently, a report from the EIA Monthly Energy Review shows that two global giant technology companies, Google and Microsoft will use as much as 24TWh of electricity throughout 2023. For context, Google and Microsoft use more energy than more than 100 countries, including Iceland, Jordan and Ghana.
This may not be particularly surprising when we see that the online and cloud services of these two companies are used by billions of users every day, including Google and Microsoft search, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive cloud services, and server machine services and data centers of these two companies.
In fact, last week we reported that Google has seen a 48 percent increase in carbon emissions since 2019 due to a sharp increase in the use of artificial intelligence technology.
Google and Microsoft both have targets to become carbon neutral companies in terms of electricity consumption by 2030, but with this increasing electricity consumption, it seems increasingly difficult for them to achieve that target, especially with how AI technology is seen to be accelerating from day to day.