Google’s increased reliance on energy-hungry data centres to power its new artificial intelligence (AI) products has resulted in a 48% rise in the company’s carbon emissions in five years.

This week, the tech giant’s annual environmental report revealed that while the company is on “an ambitious journey to help build a more sustainable future”, it has fallen short of its climate goals, with its emissions in 2023 having risen 13% on the previous year, reaching 14.3 million metric tons.

It pins the reason for this rise on “increases in data centre energy consumption and supply chain emissions”.

Data centres play a crucial role in training and operating the models that underpin AI models such as Google’s Gemini, which was released by Google in 2023 as a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4.

To do this, data centres consume huge amounts of energy – a significant proportion of which is used to cool the enormous amount of waste heat generated during computation. They also require high-voltage transmission...