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.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 3 months ago
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
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 3 months ago
All of that AI crap they keep pushing certainly doesn’t help the energy consumption though.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 3 months ago
For sure
SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Lots of people were just yelling the grid can’t handle more load like for checking cars while Google adds a countries worth of power use with AI.
Jako301@feddit.de 3 months ago
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.
David_Eight@lemmy.world 3 months ago
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.
x1gma@lemmy.world 3 months ago
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).
Womble@lemmy.world 3 months ago
To put a bit of context on those, 50GWh is a 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.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
They only do that because they project it to be profitable, i.e. they project demand for it.
It’s also asinine to claim that people don’t want it just because you don’t.
fatalicus@lemmy.world 3 months ago
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.
FaceDeer@fedia.io 3 months ago
It sounds scary, and that's all that's needed to get clicks.
Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 3 months ago
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.
iopq@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Who said they are not efficient? They just serve buildings of users. I wouldn’t 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%
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
Not surprising at all. Power hogging is the whole point of capitalism. It’s just literally electric power in this case.
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Showers worldwide use more water than …