Amid an explosion in AI, energy use and water consumption hit an all-time high in 2023 as Redmond’s data centers kick into high gear to compete.
What good is AI if you don’t have a planet to use it on?
Microsoft released its 2024 Sustainability Report on Wednesday, and it’s mostly bad news. Last year, Microsoft’s emissions went up 29%, and it used 23% more water, primarily due to “new technologies, including generative AI.”
The report covers numbers for 2023, the first full year of the AI race after ChatGPT’s November 2022 debut. Microsoft invested a reported $10 billion in OpenAI in January 2023 and added GPT-4 to the Bing search engine in early 2023. It’s now full steam ahead on selling the Copilot AI assistant add-on for Microsoft 365 products while building a new AI model that consumes tons of electricity during the training phase alone.
More complex computations mean more data centers, which gobble up water for cooling and require vast amounts of electricity, creating “new challenges” for meeting the sustainability goals Microsoft put in place four years ago.
“We have seen major changes both in the technology sector and in our understanding of what it will take to meet our climate goals,” says Microsoft.
