Technicians check equipment at a data center in Guiyang, Guizhou Province, in June. (Photo/Xinhua)
Large technology companies face major challenges, including rapidly increasing energy demands and higher carbon emissions resulting from the rapid and widespread adoption of artificial intelligence.
Google’s latest environmental report revealed a 48 percent increase in the US tech giant’s emissions over the past five years, largely due to advances in artificial intelligence, despite the company’s ambitious environmental goals. Other tech giants such as Microsoft and Amazon face similar challenges as they try to balance the high energy consumption of artificial intelligence with their low-carbon goals.
The higher energy consumption of artificial intelligence has long been a cause for concern.
According to experts, AI requires enormous amounts of energy, not only to power and keep data centers running, but also to produce and transport large quantities of chips, servers and related equipment, all of which contribute significantly to carbon emissions.
China’s rapidly growing AI and other emerging industries also face significant energy consumption challenges.
In June, a white paper on the Green Computing Power Index published by energy group Envision, green data solutions provider Hoyinn and the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology predicted that energy consumption in Chinese data centers would exceed 400 billion kilowatt hours by 2030.
Without a significant increase in the use of renewable energy, CO2 emissions from these data centers could exceed 200 million tons by 2030.
“Unless clean energy becomes the primary energy source, the large-scale use of AI will inevitably lead to an increase in companies’ short-term carbon dioxide emissions – a price that early adopters of AI technology must be willing to pay,” said Zhou Wenwen, a member of the expert committee of the New-Type Power System Innovation Alliance.
In July, the National Development and Reform Commission, together with other departments, released a special action plan on green and low-carbon development of data centers.
The plan sets goals for 2025, including a more rational national data center allocation, a reduction in Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) to below 1.5 and an annual growth of 10 percent in the use of renewable energy.
PUE is the ratio of the total amount of energy consumed by a computer data center facility to the amount of energy delivered to the computer equipment.
In recent years, major technology companies in China have taken proactive steps to promote green computing, often venturing into the energy sector to ensure a stable and clean energy supply.
Baidu has increased its procurement of green electricity and built its own renewable energy plants. Alibaba is consistently active in green electricity trading, has built distributed photovoltaic systems and signed long-term contracts to purchase green electricity.
Last year, the distributed renewable energy microgrid project of Tencent’s Tianjin high-tech cloud data center was officially connected to the grid. It was the company’s fifth renewable energy project. It has a total installed capacity of 10.54 megawatts and aims to further improve the energy efficiency of the data center.
