Google and Microsoft consume more power than some countries
Google and Microsoft consume more power than some countries
But they generate more money too.
In 2023, Google and Microsoft each consumed 24 TWh of electricity, surpassing the consumption of over 100 nations, including places like Iceland, Ghana, and Tunisia, according to an analysis by Michael Thomas. While massive energy usage means a substantial environmental impact for these tech giants, it should be noted that Google and Microsoft also generate more money than many countries. Furthermore, companies like Intel, Google, and Microsoft lead renewable energy adoption within the industry.
Detailed analysis reveals that Google's and Microsoft's electricity consumption — 24 TWh in 2023 — equals the power consumption of Azerbaijan (a nation of 10.14 million) and is higher than that of several other countries. For instance, Iceland, Ghana, the Dominican Republic, and Tunisia each consumed 19 TWh, while Jordan consumed 20 TWh. Of course, some countries consume more power than Google and Microsoft. For example, Slovakia, a country with 5.4 million inhabitants, consumes 26 TWh.
I don't see what's surprising here. They provide services for users globally. Not that it's justified, it's just kind of weird that people think global scale computing is light on electricity, apparently
All of that AI crap they keep pushing certainly doesn't help the energy consumption though.
For sure
Lots of people were just yelling the grid can't handle more load like for charging cars while Google adds a country worth of power use with AI.
Google builds entire datacenters with their own transformers and power lines, if not their own powerplants. You plug these datacenters directly into the high voltage networks that don't have big capacity problems.
The low voltage grids in residential areas on the other hand were build as cheap as possible, so increasing the load by 20% is already too much for most of them.
It's not surprising per se, but it's something that people should be more aware of. And a lot of this consumption is not providing global services (like the Google search or workspace suite) but the whole AI hype.
I didn't find numbers for Google or Microsoft specifically, but training ChatGPT 4 consumed 50 GWh on its own. The daily estimates for queries are estimated between 1-5 GWh.
Given that the extrapolation is an overestimate and calculating the actual consumption is pretty much impossible, it's still probably a lot of energy wasted for a product that people do not want (e.g. Google AI "search", Bing and Copilot being stuffed into everything).
To put a bit of context on those, 50GWh is a single medium sized power station running for 2 days. To create something that is being used around 10 million times a day all over the world.
At 10 million queries per day that puts the usage per query at 100-500 Wh, about the amount of energy used by leaving an old incandecent lightbulb on for an hour, or playing a demanding video game for about 20 minutes.
As another comparison, In the USA alone around 12,000 GWh of energy is spent in burning gasoline in vehicles every single day. So Americans driving 1% less for a single day would save more energy than creating GPT4 and the world using it for a year.
They only do that because they project it to be profitable, i.e. they project demand for it.
It's also ridiculous to claim that people don't want it just because you don't.
The thing here also is that I can't see that they have taken into account that they deliver data center services globally.
So say that my company have 100 VMs in azure. That energy usage should count for our company and country, and not Microsoft.
It sounds scary, and that's all that's needed to get clicks.
Google originally made a name for themselves by building a global search engine on low cost, low powered desktop machines running in parallel, so it's surprising because they have gone from high-efficiency to power hogs.
Not surprising at all. Power hogging is the whole point of capitalism. It's just literally electric power in this case.
Who said they are not efficient? They just serve buildings of users. I would be surprised if they didn't figure out how to do it more efficiently than Bing PER REQUEST. They have PhDs sitting around thinking how to lower power consumption by 1%
Showers worldwide use more water than ....
Google has 4.9 billion users while Microsoft has 1.6 billion active devices.
I think comparing them to small nations is dumb but it doesn't seem extreme when you take into account the huge amount of users (half the planet uses google everyday)
In any case, it's up to the government to make sure our grid is robust and runs on renewables. Microsoft is building it's own nuclear reactor because the government is so fucking inept. This is a scape goat.
They're doing what??
Microsoft is building it’s own nuclear reactor because the government is so fucking inept.
lmao. oh yeah I'm sure that nuke is gonna be hella secure.
https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-solarwinds-golden-saml-data-breach-russian-hackers
While massive energy usage means a substantial environmental impact for these tech giants, it should be noted that Google and Microsoft also generate more money than many countries. Furthermore, companies like Intel, Google, and Microsoft lead renewable energy adoption within the industry.
So fucking what? That's like excusing a mass-murderer because he's rich and he promised to "not kill quite as many people in the future."
What a useless and pandering thing to say.
No, it's not.
Them making money implies that they are being paid to use power, which is true. Their absolute carbon footprint is irrelevant given that most of what the carbon they use is at the request of someone else. The metric to judge them on is their carbon footprint relevant to peers.
I.e. it's not fair to judge a cab company for driving someone somewhere (judge the person choosing to hire a cab), but it is fair to judge them if they use gas guzzlers instead of EVs.
Why do you think using energy is bad by itself? They are paying for it and they are trying to get as much renewable as they can.
Why do you think using energy is bad by itself?
Building infrastructure has an environmental cost. Even if they're building them for themselves, wasting the energy produced on AI and some other bullshit will worse our climate catastrophe while delivering nothing useful in exchange
It would be more helpful to compare their power consumption before and after AI adoption.
Wonder what amazon's would be since they have AWS.
Google has Google Cloud and Microsoft has Azure
And AWS is bigger than both of those services yet Amazon isn't mentioned in this article.
I bet energy usage of aws is counted for the business/people using those services.
Regulate them!
Google reported to have earned 305B in 2023. Finland had an estimate of 300B GDP, while consuming 79.8 TWh of electricity.
So, in comparison, Google is massively more efficient than Finland?
If your efficiency function is centered around revenue, then yeah, of course... No surprise that one of the world's most successful for-profit companies generates more profit per watt-hour than a nation, which encompasses all sorts of non-revenue-generating activity like running hospitals and keeping street lights on.
Not surprising nor is it a negative thing. At least they are incentivized to invest in green energy. If it was China they would have opened up a few coal power plants to cover that demand.
It is negative while the grid is majority fossil fuels
I love iceland