- Google data centers used 30.8 million MWH of electricity in 2024
- That is around a 2x increase since 2020 and 7x of 2014
- The emissions of the Google claims data center fell 12% year after year
Google has published its latest sustainability report, revealing how it is becoming increasingly evident than the desire for cloud services and AI is causing large peaks in the demand for electricity.
The company says it used around 32.1 million MWH in 2024, 30.8 million MWH of which were consumed by their data centers, an amazing 95.8% of its total consumption, and more than double the amount of energy than its data centers used in 2020 (14.4 million MWh), just before the explosion of AI’s tools, the adoption of consumers on a large scale.
Looking back even more, Google data centers used approximately four million MWH of electricity in 2014, marking a 7x colossal increase over the last decade.
96% of Google’s energy consumption comes from data centers
The report added that the total electricity consumption for Google increased by 27% year after year in 2024, after an increase of 17% announced in its 2023 report.
However, the company emphasized that it is advancing to clean its energy supply despite the great growth.
Despite the increase in demand, the energy emissions of the data center were reduced by 12% in 2024 through a combination of clean energy initiatives and improvements in the efficiency of the data center.
The amount of computing per unit of electricity has increased around 6 times in the last five years, with 2024 the effectiveness of energy use in the theoretical minimum of 1.0, in 2024, was 1.09.
Google explained that, on this scale, even an improvement of 0.01 could have considerable positive consequences.
In addition, Google maintains a 100% renewable energy coincidence worldwide, something that has been doing since 2018. The report details how clean energy purchases in 2024 avoided 8.2 million metric tons of CO2E emissions.
The company recently signed 60 new contracts worth about eight gigawatts in new clean energy, including a geothermal plant in Nevada, solar projects in South Carolina and Oklahoma, and the next nuclear reactors.
Although Google continues to make significant progress, the growing demand highlights the challenges facing the technological giant. Looking towards the future, Google is driving carbon intelligent computer science to change computer tasks to cleaner regions or times.
