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Title: Tech Giants' Indirect Emissions Rose 150% In Three Years

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/10/2154...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Indirect carbon emissions
from the operations of four of the leading AI-focused tech companies rose on
average by 150% from 2020-2023, due to the demands of power-hungry data
centers, a United Nations report (PDF) said on Thursday. The use of
artificial intelligence by Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta drove up
their global indirect emissions because of the vast amounts of energy
required to power data centers, the report by the International
Telecommunication Union (ITU), the U.N. agency for digital technologies,
said. Indirect emissions include those generated by purchased electricity,
steam, heating and cooling consumed by a company. Amazon's operational carbon
emissions grew the most at 182% in 2023 compared to three years before,
followed by Microsoft at 155%, Meta at 145% and Alphabet at 138%, according
to the report. The ITU tracked the greenhouse gas emissions of 200 leading
digital companies between 2020 and 2023. [...] As investment in AI increases,
carbon emissions from the top-emitting AI systems are predicted to reach up
to 102.6 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, the report
stated. The data centres that are needed for AI development could also put
pressure on existing energy infrastructure. "The rapid growth of artificial
intelligence is driving a sharp rise in global electricity demand, with
electricity use by data centers increasing four times faster than the overall
rise in electricity consumption," the report found. It also highlighted that
although a growing number of digital companies had set emissions targets,
those ambitions had not yet fully translated into actual reductions of
emissions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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