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Comment by WheatMillington | Hacker News Reader

Your comment is a little dismissive. Firstly, the headline doesn't mention "versus last year", and the 48% figure is straight from the document you mentioned and is repeated often within that document. It's directly from Google, and is significant. Moreover that document itself states (page 31) "As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands". It's clear that AI advancements are the biggest hurdle in terms of energy use and therefore CO2 emissions for Google.

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The article does a good job of clearly stating that the 48% is compared to 2019, but words like "surge" and "spike" do not closely match that factual basis and imho are misleading.

Attributing the 48% to AI specifically is largely baseless though. From my skim, the Google report does not make any specific claims about the increase in datacenter emission coming from AI. The closest claims are on page 12 where "the rapid advancement of AI has brought necessary increased attention to its energy consumption and resource demands" is juxtaposed with "total data center electricity consumption grew 17%"

In particular the third "key point" seems highly misleading.

> The company attributed the emissions spike to an increase in data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions driven by rapid advancements in and demand for AI.

The word "spike" does not occur in the document and the 48% number is never close to a mention of AI. While the 17% "spike" may have been attributed to AI by Google, I think it is clear the document does not attribute the 48% to AI.

Claiming that emissions surged 50% due exclusively to AI (as in the headline) is unsupported by the Google report, which is the article's singular source.

Again, looking at the graph of emissions at Google on pg 31, it's clear that the increase is linear after a dip 2019-2020 and the report identifies supply chain issues as a major source of emissions in addition to datacenter electricity costs—again, notably not specifically calling out their AI training/inference costs as a reason for their increase. The report does identify AI as a challenge going forwards, however that's not the same as saying it's exclusively responsible for the last 5 years of emissions.

It's indeed pretty spun. Some quick googling shows that real GDP is up 11.5% from 2019-2024, which makes up a bunch of the "effect" right there (obviously datacenter power isn't directly tied to economic activity as a first principles thing, but like everything else at scale it's going to be pretty darn close).

Of the remainder, I get an average yearly increase of... 5.8% over the time period in question. I mean, that's an effect, but it's certainly not a big one.

It doesn’t say “versus last year”, but it does say: “Google’s emissions also increased 13% year over year in 2023, per the report.”

What is the surrounding text for "versus last year"? I cannot find "versus" or "year" in the article.

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