Faltered Carbon The already formidable environmental toll of generative AI is even worse than it seems because businesses aren’t being transparent about the emissions given off by their enormous new AI datacenters. Take Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon and one of the largest cloud computing platforms in the world, which doesn’t provide location-based or data center-specific statistics in its emissions reports. That means it’s impossible to tell how much greenhouse gases the massive facilities — and specifically, ones that host or train AI models — are producing, right at the most important moment for the public and policymakers to be grappling with that information. “The environmental impact of AWS is not broken out specifically, and you can only find the emissions of Amazon overall,” Benn Caddy at the IT analysis firm Canalys, told the Register. “In fairness, Google and Microsoft similarly publish annual sustainability reports for their wider respective companies, reflecting emissions beyond their cloud businesses.” Off the Books Last year, an analysis conducted by The Guardian found that the actual emissions of data centers operated by AI leaders like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, are 662 percent higher than what’s been officially reported. The analysis used data between 2020 and 2022, before the AI rush was in full swing, so it’s almost certain the numbers would be even more dramatic now. Amazon’s chicanery seems particularly egregious. Its “creative accounting” would have you believe that its emissions have actually gone down. This seems extroardinarily unlikely, the Register notes, given the continued…We Aren't Being Told the Real Extent of AI Datacenter Emissions