Energizer Bunny Google’s latest environmental impact report shows that the Silicon Valley stalwart is woefully behind its ambitious plan to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2030, as flagged by The Associated Press. The culprit? AI. Per the AP, Google’s 2023 carbon emissions saw a year-over-year increase of a staggering 13 percent from the previous year and 49 percent from 2019, with Google citing its AI efforts as the driving force behind the shift. Though AI’s energy demands remain mostly invisible to the public eye, it’s an incredibly resource-intensive field. AI models practically guzzle energy — one search on OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for example, is estimated to be equivalent to that of ten Google searches — by putting heavy stress on the data centers needed to keep the models running. The servers at said data centers also run the risk of overheating, meaning that companies like Google and Microsoft often need to use water to cool them back down. (Both Google and Microsoft use an air-cooling system so long as outside temperatures stay below a certain heat threshold, but in a warming world, there are and will continue to be a lot of hot days.) In short, Google’s quest to keep up in the ongoing Silicon Valley AI race has come at the expense of its efforts to reduce carbon emissions. And though Google and other AI makers continue to promote AI and machine learning as tools for mitigating climate change, the public has mostly seen generative AI products like Google’s AI-integrated…Google Is Failing to Meet Important Climate Targets so Its AI Can Tell You to Put Glue on Pizza