15 ms·

Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

153 points by melling 2y ago

strangattractor 2y ago
So this is why people eventual become batteries for the matrix.
- jbandela1 2y ago
  Apparently, instead of batteries the original idea was to have them be part of a brain based neural net which makes a lot more sense than batteries. But this was felt to be too complicated.
  - hangonhn 2y ago
    Wow. Thanks for sharing that. I was always bothered by that aspect of the movie but your explanation makes a lot more sense.
  - scotty79 2y ago
    Wow, it would make so much more sense. Humans could be doing processing for AI when they are asleep in virtual world and what they consider their waking hours with free will would be actually a dream so they can regenerate. AI would be syncing their dreams and providing structure to maintain illusion that it's a real world.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    Exactly. Why they gave up on the human collective neural net movie plot and replaced it with the human batteries one is beyond me. It makes no sense, humans make terrible batteries. If the machines from the Matrix needed to use some mammals as batteries, why not just use cows instead of humans? They'd be much more complacent with living in the Matrix, grazing on virtual fields, and less likely to wise up and try to escape and rebel against the machines since they're not very intelligent and the machines would need a lot less processing power to simulate a realistic cow world than the world in 1999 for humans. To wit, if someone has access to a lot of GPU compute, could you please use gen-AI to re-make the Matrix but with the characters as cows, I'd pay to watch it. Would definitely beat Matrix Resurrections or whatever that cash grab turd was called.
    - jimbobthrowawy 2y ago
      It's an easy analogy to say in <10 seconds that non-technical people can understand. Had they not mentioned "bioelectricity" at all, it might have been harder to nitpick.
    - affgrff3 2y ago
      I came up with this explanation to make me enjoy the movie more: The world outside the matrix is not the real world, but just another layer by the machines for obfuscation. In the real real world humans are actually used as processing units but since it is easier for the humans to accept and not ask further questions, the intermediate level with humans as batteries is introduced by the machines.
  - triceratops 2y ago
    Isn't there a long-standing myth that humans only use 10% of their brainpower? They could've used that to explain that the machines were stealing the other 90%. Anyone can understand that in 5 seconds. Of course that means anyone unplugged from the Matrix would immediately become an S-tier genius. And how the hell do you write that?
josefritzishere 2y ago
The galling part of this is that the demand for AI is artificial. Consumers are not demanding AI.
- speedgoose 2y ago
  Source?
  - morkalork 2y ago
    Gemini's terrible search answers didn't become a viral meme because people liked and appreciated it.
- givemeethekeys 2y ago
  Businesses and wealthy people want AI so they can lay people off and hold onto their money, and build stuff faster to capture more marketshare / power. There wasn't demand for computers either. Or, the industrial revolution. AI is a competitive advantage for those that can leverage it.
  - Swizec 2y ago
    Consumers ask for AI all the time. Their requests sound like this: - "Google search is drowned by SEO, I can't find anything anymore" - "Wow all these ads suck" - "Ugh my social media is full of hucksters and bots" - "My job applications all go into a black hole" - "LoL gmail can't even find emails I know are there" - "Ffs stop autocorrecting to duck" - "Oh wow we can't even say 'vagina' anymore because The Algorithm" - "Support doesn't even read my message, why do I bother" - "I can't keep up with all my inboxes" - "This meeting should've been an email" - "The press release makes no sense, can someone translate corporatespeak?" - "Ecomm sites are awful why can't I just find what I'm looking for?" etc. We already use AI for all sorts of things. This will only accelerate. Half the things that used to be AI aren't even called AI anymore. That's because "AI" is a marketing label. When a technology becomes mundane, it ceases to be called AI and we find something new.
alecco 2y ago
I don't like 2024 Google, but they seem to be the only ones trying (at least) to make the least impact with their energy consumption. Why aren't there hit pieces like this on the US intelligence massive Utah Data Center? (for example)
- bogota 2y ago
  I think it’s pretty clear that it’s easy to sell rage against companies right now. News just tells people what they want to hear in this age
  - kortilla 2y ago
    Because the NSA doesn’t care about their public image or energy consumption. Google at one time did so this makes them pretty big hypocrites
    - TaylorAlexander 2y ago
      Yeah. Public pressure might actually work against Google, but it’s unlikely to work against the NSA so easily.
      - refulgentis 2y ago
        I'm curious for your perspective: It seems clear that the article is not about arbitrary data center usage, it's about a large increase in data center usage at Google, attributable to AI. The initial premise of the thread was "Why isn't this about (arbitrary data center other than Google)?" Isn't that easily answered by: because it's about the delta, and the context of AI, where Google is perceived behind, and Satya famously pointed out the energy demands x their margins puts them in a strategic situation with only bad choices? Witb that context, do you believe this is attributable to someone picking what to write articles about, based on how much they'll be able to influence them to change their behavior?
- rtkwe 2y ago
  It was talked about a lot when it was first opened, news massively biases towards new topics.
jsiepkes 2y ago
And once again a big tech company proves that as soon as their "principes" are put to the test they will abandon them almost instantly. When buying some wind energy was easy and wasn't really a trade-off they were quick to use big phrases like being "committed to the planet" and such. Commitments seem to be rather "flexible" with these companies.
- moandcompany 2y ago
  They said they were an "AI-first company" :)
- Culonavirus 2y ago
  Microsoft: spends an absolute fortune on AI compute. Also Microsoft: Here, take this "carbon aware" Windows Update.
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    I mean they're just doing what the oil companies did to great success for decades, the bullshit about buying a hybrid or electric car, or recycling^1 your plastic. Why reckon with the impact of your global industry on the planet and have to answer hard questions when you can just make it the consumers fault and guilt powerless people into using a canvas bag^2 instead of a plastic one, despite the fact that the only reason all the fucking plastic bags exist is because your company is making them by the billion? 1: If you want to get angry, look into what an utter farce plastic recycling is. 2: Not that reusable bags are a bad thing in the slightest, I just don't like being condescended to for using a free resource provided at point of sale by a multi-national conglomerate that's burning the world and then turning around to chide me for having a slightly older car than I otherwise could.
MicolashKyoka 2y ago
meaningless stat in the grand scheme of things. eventually, it will all transition to nuclear/solar. the question is does it move the needle in a meaningful way right now. so much hand wringing about carbon emissions only for germany to end up burning coal again.
- timeon 2y ago
  Germany meme is nice, but it is probably just a dent in global coal use that breaks new record almost every year. Transition to nuclear/solar is still fantasy. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption https://app.electricitymaps.com/map https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
Frieren 2y ago
I see the current gold rush of AI the same way I saw crypto-currencies. Even if originally there were people that believed in the concept it became just a snake-oil sellers business. The parallelism is made even more relevant by its hungry use of electricity. There is a future for AI but it is not what we see companies developing right now. Chat-bots are more dystopian and problematic than useful. AI future (and present) is on analyzing big chunks of data about chemical bounds, traffic-flow, astronomical observations, etc. But all that really useful AI is not attracting the kind of investment that flashy consumer-oriented chat-bots are getting.
- knowaveragejoe 2y ago
  For what it's worth, all of that really useful AI you mention(and then some!) is attracting the kind of investment you want, you just don't hear about it because it's not interesting to the average person.
- ETH_start 2y ago
  There is reason to be cautious about every kind of endeavor where the potential for enrichment can cloud judgment. However, the possibilities opened up by technologies this radical in the magnitude of the improvements they make in specific fundamental societal functions are enormous, and for that reason, they are on the balance massively beneficial, and that includes chat bots.
  - piva00 2y ago
    > However, the possibilities opened up by technologies this radical in the magnitude of the improvements they make in specific fundamental societal functions are enormous, and for that reason, they are on the balance massively beneficial, and that includes chat bots. The improvements it can be dreamed of to the bottom line of companies by replacing expensive labour are massive, that's why it got US$ 1tn Capex downed into it as noted in another article from Goldman Sachs shared today on HN. It doesn't mean it's massively beneficial to societal functions, a bigger case for that would be a clean, and massively cheap energy source (if fusion turned out to be viable and scalable, for example) but we don't see US$ 1tn poured into the pursuit of that because it does not promise improving companies' bottom line in a short time frame. AI can definitely turn out to be a panacea but more and more grifters are attaching themselves to it, and the companies churning out the most advances of it are not really invested in improving society as a whole, that's the marketing speak used but we in tech have seen those empty promises of utopian changes turning out to be just smoke and mirrors for the surveillance capitalism age to set in.
zamalek 2y ago
It turns out AI will kill us, but not in the way that the billionaires were paranoid about. Who needs guns when a planet-sized gas chamber will do?
- gmm1990 2y ago
  the infinite paper clip machine concept was prescient
kens 2y ago
The headline is bogus and most of the comments are responding to the headline. Google's emissions increased 13% since last year, "primarily due to increases in data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions." It's unclear how much is due to AI. The supposed surge is a 48% increase compared to *2019*, consisting of moderate increases every year since 2020, not a nearly 50% surge due to AI. Google's document is at: https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2024-environmental-report.pdf https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2024-e... See pdf page 8 / document page 7 for details, as well as the graph on page 32/31.
- elicksaur 2y ago
  Maybe AI summarized the document for the reporter.
- WheatMillington 2y ago
  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.
  - qeternity 2y ago
    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.”
    - thethirdone 2y ago
      What is the surrounding text for "versus last year"? I cannot find "versus" or "year" in the article.
  - ajross 2y ago
seydor 2y ago
Scaling hypothesis baby! maybe the bitter lesson wasn't so bitter after all
v101 2y ago
[flagged]
philipkglass 2y ago
Here's the underlying report that this CNBC story is based on: https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2024-environmental-report.pdf https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2024-e... The key driver for the CO2 growth is "scope 2" emissions, mainly electricity demand from data centers. See pages 34-38 in the PDF for the definition of scope 2 emissions and overall progress on running data centers with carbon free energy. They're currently at 63% CFE, the same as in 2022, but absolute growth in electricity consumption also meant absolute growth in emissions from the other 37%.
electricdreams 2y ago
[dead]
ConanRus 2y ago
[dead]
slashdave 2y ago
In my imagination, I picture a long-time Google employee who spent his/her entire career dutifully pouring over every minutia of their search infrastructure to squeeze the most performance out of every watt, in a quest to make Google a better, more environmentally friendly company. And then comes AI...
- xnx 2y ago
  > And then comes AI... And the optimization work they did is even more significant and useful?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
xnx 2y ago
Google's latest environmental report posted today: https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/2024-environmental-report/ https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/2024...
westurner 2y ago
A few solutions for this: - "Ask HN: How to reuse waste heat and water from AI datacenters?" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40820952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40820952 - "Ask HN: Can CPUs etc. be made from just graphene and/or other carbon forms?" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40719725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40719725 (Edit) - "Desalination system could produce freshwater that is cheaper than tap water" (2023) : "Extreme salt-resisting multistage solar distilation with thermohaline convection" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39999225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39999225 ... "AI Is Accelerating the Loss of Our Scarcest Natural Resource: Water" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40783690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40783690 - "Ask HN: Does mounting servers parallel with the temperature gradient trap heat?" (2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23033210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23033210 : > Would mounting servers sideways (vertically) allow heat to transfer out of the rack? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39555606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39555606
- westurner 2y ago
  - Concrete parking lot TPV Thermal Solar canopies, And concrete supercapacitor batteries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40862190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40862190
konschubert 2y ago
Luckily we have ways to create energy emissions-free.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
That should be weighted against how many CO2 is saved by LLM due to increased efficiency. A person living large in a big house, eating well, flying overseas for vacations, with 2-3 cars in the garage, consumes much more CO2 than a GPU that replaces him.
t0bia_s 2y ago
Interesting how CO2 consumption is everywhere (because of ESG) but no mention about clean water consumption on cooling serves. https://time.com/5814276/google-data-centers-water/ https://time.com/5814276/google-data-centers-water/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/analysis/data-center-water-usage-remains-hidden/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/analysis/data-center-w... https://www.jstor.org/stable/24907379 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24907379 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00478-x https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00478-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01377-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01377-7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-6la_I-xkQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-6la_I-xkQ

153 points by melling 2y ago

strangattractor 2y ago

So this is why people eventual become batteries for the matrix.

jbandela1 2y ago
Apparently, instead of batteries the original idea was to have them be part of a brain based neural net which makes a lot more sense than batteries. But this was felt to be too complicated.
- hangonhn 2y ago
  Wow. Thanks for sharing that. I was always bothered by that aspect of the movie but your explanation makes a lot more sense.
- scotty79 2y ago
  Wow, it would make so much more sense. Humans could be doing processing for AI when they are asleep in virtual world and what they consider their waking hours with free will would be actually a dream so they can regenerate. AI would be syncing their dreams and providing structure to maintain illusion that it's a real world.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  Exactly. Why they gave up on the human collective neural net movie plot and replaced it with the human batteries one is beyond me. It makes no sense, humans make terrible batteries. If the machines from the Matrix needed to use some mammals as batteries, why not just use cows instead of humans? They'd be much more complacent with living in the Matrix, grazing on virtual fields, and less likely to wise up and try to escape and rebel against the machines since they're not very intelligent and the machines would need a lot less processing power to simulate a realistic cow world than the world in 1999 for humans. To wit, if someone has access to a lot of GPU compute, could you please use gen-AI to re-make the Matrix but with the characters as cows, I'd pay to watch it. Would definitely beat Matrix Resurrections or whatever that cash grab turd was called.
  - jimbobthrowawy 2y ago
    It's an easy analogy to say in <10 seconds that non-technical people can understand. Had they not mentioned "bioelectricity" at all, it might have been harder to nitpick.
  - affgrff3 2y ago
    I came up with this explanation to make me enjoy the movie more: The world outside the matrix is not the real world, but just another layer by the machines for obfuscation. In the real real world humans are actually used as processing units but since it is easier for the humans to accept and not ask further questions, the intermediate level with humans as batteries is introduced by the machines.
- triceratops 2y ago
  Isn't there a long-standing myth that humans only use 10% of their brainpower? They could've used that to explain that the machines were stealing the other 90%. Anyone can understand that in 5 seconds. Of course that means anyone unplugged from the Matrix would immediately become an S-tier genius. And how the hell do you write that?

josefritzishere 2y ago

The galling part of this is that the demand for AI is artificial. Consumers are not demanding AI.

speedgoose 2y ago
Source?
- morkalork 2y ago
  Gemini's terrible search answers didn't become a viral meme because people liked and appreciated it.
givemeethekeys 2y ago
Businesses and wealthy people want AI so they can lay people off and hold onto their money, and build stuff faster to capture more marketshare / power. There wasn't demand for computers either. Or, the industrial revolution. AI is a competitive advantage for those that can leverage it.
- Swizec 2y ago
  Consumers ask for AI all the time. Their requests sound like this: - "Google search is drowned by SEO, I can't find anything anymore" - "Wow all these ads suck" - "Ugh my social media is full of hucksters and bots" - "My job applications all go into a black hole" - "LoL gmail can't even find emails I know are there" - "Ffs stop autocorrecting to duck" - "Oh wow we can't even say 'vagina' anymore because The Algorithm" - "Support doesn't even read my message, why do I bother" - "I can't keep up with all my inboxes" - "This meeting should've been an email" - "The press release makes no sense, can someone translate corporatespeak?" - "Ecomm sites are awful why can't I just find what I'm looking for?" etc. We already use AI for all sorts of things. This will only accelerate. Half the things that used to be AI aren't even called AI anymore. That's because "AI" is a marketing label. When a technology becomes mundane, it ceases to be called AI and we find something new.

alecco 2y ago

I don't like 2024 Google, but they seem to be the only ones trying (at least) to make the least impact with their energy consumption. Why aren't there hit pieces like this on the US intelligence massive Utah Data Center? (for example)

bogota 2y ago
I think it’s pretty clear that it’s easy to sell rage against companies right now. News just tells people what they want to hear in this age
- kortilla 2y ago
  Because the NSA doesn’t care about their public image or energy consumption. Google at one time did so this makes them pretty big hypocrites
  - TaylorAlexander 2y ago
    Yeah. Public pressure might actually work against Google, but it’s unlikely to work against the NSA so easily.
    - refulgentis 2y ago
      I'm curious for your perspective: It seems clear that the article is not about arbitrary data center usage, it's about a large increase in data center usage at Google, attributable to AI. The initial premise of the thread was "Why isn't this about (arbitrary data center other than Google)?" Isn't that easily answered by: because it's about the delta, and the context of AI, where Google is perceived behind, and Satya famously pointed out the energy demands x their margins puts them in a strategic situation with only bad choices? Witb that context, do you believe this is attributable to someone picking what to write articles about, based on how much they'll be able to influence them to change their behavior?
rtkwe 2y ago
It was talked about a lot when it was first opened, news massively biases towards new topics.

jsiepkes 2y ago

And once again a big tech company proves that as soon as their "principes" are put to the test they will abandon them almost instantly. When buying some wind energy was easy and wasn't really a trade-off they were quick to use big phrases like being "committed to the planet" and such. Commitments seem to be rather "flexible" with these companies.

moandcompany 2y ago
They said they were an "AI-first company" :)
Culonavirus 2y ago
Microsoft: spends an absolute fortune on AI compute. Also Microsoft: Here, take this "carbon aware" Windows Update.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  I mean they're just doing what the oil companies did to great success for decades, the bullshit about buying a hybrid or electric car, or recycling^1 your plastic. Why reckon with the impact of your global industry on the planet and have to answer hard questions when you can just make it the consumers fault and guilt powerless people into using a canvas bag^2 instead of a plastic one, despite the fact that the only reason all the fucking plastic bags exist is because your company is making them by the billion? 1: If you want to get angry, look into what an utter farce plastic recycling is. 2: Not that reusable bags are a bad thing in the slightest, I just don't like being condescended to for using a free resource provided at point of sale by a multi-national conglomerate that's burning the world and then turning around to chide me for having a slightly older car than I otherwise could.

MicolashKyoka 2y ago

meaningless stat in the grand scheme of things. eventually, it will all transition to nuclear/solar. the question is does it move the needle in a meaningful way right now. so much hand wringing about carbon emissions only for germany to end up burning coal again.

timeon 2y ago
Germany meme is nice, but it is probably just a dent in global coal use that breaks new record almost every year. Transition to nuclear/solar is still fantasy. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption https://app.electricitymaps.com/map https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

Frieren 2y ago

I see the current gold rush of AI the same way I saw crypto-currencies. Even if originally there were people that believed in the concept it became just a snake-oil sellers business. The parallelism is made even more relevant by its hungry use of electricity. There is a future for AI but it is not what we see companies developing right now. Chat-bots are more dystopian and problematic than useful. AI future (and present) is on analyzing big chunks of data about chemical bounds, traffic-flow, astronomical observations, etc. But all that really useful AI is not attracting the kind of investment that flashy consumer-oriented chat-bots are getting.

knowaveragejoe 2y ago
For what it's worth, all of that really useful AI you mention(and then some!) is attracting the kind of investment you want, you just don't hear about it because it's not interesting to the average person.
ETH_start 2y ago
There is reason to be cautious about every kind of endeavor where the potential for enrichment can cloud judgment. However, the possibilities opened up by technologies this radical in the magnitude of the improvements they make in specific fundamental societal functions are enormous, and for that reason, they are on the balance massively beneficial, and that includes chat bots.
- piva00 2y ago
  > However, the possibilities opened up by technologies this radical in the magnitude of the improvements they make in specific fundamental societal functions are enormous, and for that reason, they are on the balance massively beneficial, and that includes chat bots. The improvements it can be dreamed of to the bottom line of companies by replacing expensive labour are massive, that's why it got US$ 1tn Capex downed into it as noted in another article from Goldman Sachs shared today on HN. It doesn't mean it's massively beneficial to societal functions, a bigger case for that would be a clean, and massively cheap energy source (if fusion turned out to be viable and scalable, for example) but we don't see US$ 1tn poured into the pursuit of that because it does not promise improving companies' bottom line in a short time frame. AI can definitely turn out to be a panacea but more and more grifters are attaching themselves to it, and the companies churning out the most advances of it are not really invested in improving society as a whole, that's the marketing speak used but we in tech have seen those empty promises of utopian changes turning out to be just smoke and mirrors for the surveillance capitalism age to set in.

zamalek 2y ago

It turns out AI will kill us, but not in the way that the billionaires were paranoid about. Who needs guns when a planet-sized gas chamber will do?

gmm1990 2y ago
the infinite paper clip machine concept was prescient

kens 2y ago

The headline is bogus and most of the comments are responding to the headline. Google's emissions increased 13% since last year, "primarily due to increases in data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions." It's unclear how much is due to AI. The supposed surge is a 48% increase compared to *2019*, consisting of moderate increases every year since 2020, not a nearly 50% surge due to AI. Google's document is at: https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2024-environmental-report.pdf https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2024-e... See pdf page 8 / document page 7 for details, as well as the graph on page 32/31.

elicksaur 2y ago
Maybe AI summarized the document for the reporter.
WheatMillington 2y ago
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.
- qeternity 2y ago
  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.”
  - thethirdone 2y ago
    What is the surrounding text for "versus last year"? I cannot find "versus" or "year" in the article.
- ajross 2y ago

seydor 2y ago

Scaling hypothesis baby! maybe the bitter lesson wasn't so bitter after all

v101 2y ago

[flagged]

philipkglass 2y ago

Here's the underlying report that this CNBC story is based on: https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2024-environmental-report.pdf https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2024-e... The key driver for the CO2 growth is "scope 2" emissions, mainly electricity demand from data centers. See pages 34-38 in the PDF for the definition of scope 2 emissions and overall progress on running data centers with carbon free energy. They're currently at 63% CFE, the same as in 2022, but absolute growth in electricity consumption also meant absolute growth in emissions from the other 37%.

electricdreams 2y ago

[dead]

ConanRus 2y ago

[dead]

slashdave 2y ago

In my imagination, I picture a long-time Google employee who spent his/her entire career dutifully pouring over every minutia of their search infrastructure to squeeze the most performance out of every watt, in a quest to make Google a better, more environmentally friendly company. And then comes AI...

xnx 2y ago
> And then comes AI... And the optimization work they did is even more significant and useful?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

xnx 2y ago

Google's latest environmental report posted today: https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/2024-environmental-report/ https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/2024...

westurner 2y ago

A few solutions for this: - "Ask HN: How to reuse waste heat and water from AI datacenters?" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40820952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40820952 - "Ask HN: Can CPUs etc. be made from just graphene and/or other carbon forms?" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40719725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40719725 (Edit) - "Desalination system could produce freshwater that is cheaper than tap water" (2023) : "Extreme salt-resisting multistage solar distilation with thermohaline convection" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39999225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39999225 ... "AI Is Accelerating the Loss of Our Scarcest Natural Resource: Water" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40783690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40783690 - "Ask HN: Does mounting servers parallel with the temperature gradient trap heat?" (2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23033210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23033210 : > Would mounting servers sideways (vertically) allow heat to transfer out of the rack? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39555606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39555606

westurner 2y ago
- Concrete parking lot TPV Thermal Solar canopies, And concrete supercapacitor batteries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40862190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40862190

konschubert 2y ago

Luckily we have ways to create energy emissions-free.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago

That should be weighted against how many CO2 is saved by LLM due to increased efficiency. A person living large in a big house, eating well, flying overseas for vacations, with 2-3 cars in the garage, consumes much more CO2 than a GPU that replaces him.

t0bia_s 2y ago

Interesting how CO2 consumption is everywhere (because of ESG) but no mention about clean water consumption on cooling serves. https://time.com/5814276/google-data-centers-water/ https://time.com/5814276/google-data-centers-water/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/analysis/data-center-water-usage-remains-hidden/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/analysis/data-center-w... https://www.jstor.org/stable/24907379 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24907379 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00478-x https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00478-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01377-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01377-7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-6la_I-xkQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-6la_I-xkQ