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
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.
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.
Those corporations are serving users, they wouldn’t need all that power if billions weren’t using their services
lol yeah whatever. keep shilling.
Again, users actually use it
And I’m using my AC, we’re both using power. How many times has the government told one of these companies to use less power because the grid can’t handle the strain their servers put on it?
And it’s not like these companies aren’t herding people toward these cloud services. A few weeks ago my Google Cloud storage was maxed out so I wanted to delete some photos/videos off their cloud while keeping them on my phone. Legit couldn’t figure out how to do that and just ended up deleting stuff permanently.
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.
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.
Showers worldwide use more water than …
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.
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%
Not surprising at all. Power hogging is the whole point of capitalism. It’s just literally electric power in this case.
I originally read that as ‘Google and Microsoft hold more power than most countries’, which is also true.
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.
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.
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
Wonder what amazon’s would be since they have AWS.
I bet energy usage of aws is counted for the business/people using those services.
Regulate them!
I love iceland
One decent sized factory uses more power in one hour than I do all year. There’s millions of them.
