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
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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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.
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Don't forget to set you AC to 80 because the grid can't handle the load lol. That's exactly why this info is important, ecological solutions are somehow always trusted on individuals when the vast majority of the issue lies with corporations.
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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.
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It's OK, I sort my garbage to make a better world. Evens it out.
Yeah, and we're all using paper straws now, so it's double evened out
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You also use Gmail and force Google to run their servers to power it.
Reducing your carbon footprint as much as possible is important, but it's absurd to get mad at companies that power 90% of the world's businesses for using a bunch of power to do so. It takes power to do those things. Get mad at the companies who are over consuming relative to their peers and those that are driving demand towards unattainable activities. Just getting mad at people for moving and using energy is absurd.
I just wish we never got to this point to begin with. We shouldn't have trusted all our keys to a single cool startup in the early 2000s.
To be honest, one single company running all the infrastructure is probably way better on the environment than millions of small providers
Is not. Small providers may go bankrupt if they are too wasteful, one single company thinks big. Thinking big it introduces to everyone at once various stupid things which waste energy too. Not the case with small providers. As in using Gmail's webpage versus an IMAP client.
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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??
A BSOD in a reactor control system... just what the world needed.
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I originally read that as 'Google and Microsoft hold more power than most countries', which is also true.
Very true. I've seen how politicians of some countries do a complete lap-dance whenever a FAANG company entertains the thought of building a datacenter in their territory.
Weird metric, but pretty sure UGGs or KitchenAid hold more power than Lichtenstein or Tuvalu, so not unique to tech giants.
It's definately cheaper to have some in-house power plants than to pay utilities for the electricity more often than not, and hydroelectric or battery storage might also be cost-effective at times, although I'd say a bit less so than generation.
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.
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.
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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
Regulate them!
I love iceland
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