Google may preach sustainability, but they are far from climate neutral.
Google’s data centers consumed a staggering 30.8 million megawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, more than double compared to 2020. This is revealed in the company’s latest sustainability report.
The growth is driven by the high demand from data centers to support AI services and cloud capacity. This infrastructure consumes 95.8 percent of Google‘s total power supply. Ten years ago, that consumption was presumably still below 4 million megawatt-hours, writes TechCrunch.
Still a Long Way to Go
Google is often praised for the efficiency of its data centers, with an average Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.09 in 2024. The energy consumption of its data centers has been reduced, but that progress has slowed significantly. The improvement compared to ten years ago is only 0.02.
Therefore, Google is now investing in alternative energy to become a CO2-free company. Sustainability is fortunately popular in the data center market. The tech giant recently closed deals for 1.3 gigawatts of solar energy in the US, is working on geothermal projects, and is committed to hundreds of megawatts from stable sources such as nuclear fission and fusion.
“Currently, Google globally sources an average of 66 percent of its data center consumption from emission-free sources, measured hour by hour,” says Michael Terrell, Head of Advanced Energy at Google, to TechCrunch. “In Latin America, this rises to 92 percent, but in Africa and the Middle East, it remains at 5 percent.”
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