Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries

https://www.techradar.com/pro/google-and-microsoft-now-each-consume-more-power-than-some-fairly-big-countries

by mikece • 2 years ago

66 66 2 years ago

grecy2• 2 years ago

Given how wildly profitable they are, we should be passing laws that they must produce X % of their power needs from renewable sources, where X approaches 100%. This would be a jobs program that would also help the planet. Win win.

Investors would make slightly less money in the short term, but our grandchildren will be able to live. I think that is a good trade off.

sakex• 2 years ago

I think I heard Google was aiming to do that by 2030. Not sure though

Sayrus• 2 years ago

Not sure about Google but AWS was planning to do that by 2030 and is seemingly on track to do that by 2025.

Amazon is the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy and is on a path to powering our operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025—five years ahead of our original target of 2030.

https://aws.amazon.com/energy-utilities/sustainability/

mrweasel2• 2 years ago

Remember when every company and government all had 2020 plans? Someone should collect all those plans and follow up and see how many was actually implemented, split on "by chance" or "deliberate action".

sva_• 2 years ago

There seems to be some traction with big tech investing in fission reactors and fusion research.

energy1232• 2 years ago

Primarily renewables:

https://bep.brookfield.com/press-releases/bep/brookfield-and...

bboygravity• 2 years ago

Just train your AI on sunny windy days pls Microsoft and Google, k thnx.

JumpCrisscross7• 2 years ago

we should be passing laws that they must produce X % of their power needs from renewable sources

Much more efficient to do this through the tax code. (Use corporate taxes to do what you want instead of delegating our energy mix to an ad company.)

wepple• 2 years ago

They mostly are. You don’t need laws… when you want good data center distribution you’re going to be putting DCs where the grid can’t support such a step change in consumption. So they need new energy production, and it’s typically going to be renewable

edhelas3• 2 years ago

Google, Microsoft and others are directly buying electricity from nuclear and renewable sources, doing some major greenwashing this way.

https://www.ans.org/news/article-5842/amazon-buys-nuclearpow...

By doing that they force all the others to rely on the "other" sources (gas, coal...) and not replace fast enough those ones with clean sources.

The production is physically limited, if you have the money and power to be green, the others are not and you can seriously slow down the transition.

I'd prefer that those nuclear plans and renewable farms are used for better purposes as hospitals, industries, homes...

JumpCrisscross7• 2 years ago

production is physically limited

By what? We could easily sustain higher production rates for solar, wind and nuclear. The constraints are mainly bureaucratic.

prefer that those nuclear plans and renewable farms are used for better purposes as hospitals, industries, homes

How do you aim to pay for them?

jsnell2• 2 years ago

Why does it matter whether e.g. a hospital runs on renewable energy or not? Why is "industry" good but "data centers" are bad?

If some companies care enough about their image to pay extra to buy green energy, that's good! It makes that production more profitable, and encourages more such production to be built faster. Why are you trying to disincentivize that with "greenwashing" slurs?

IggleSniggle• 2 years ago

This logic just doesn't hold up, regardless of where the intentions behind the decision land. All those energy consumers are going to use the energy one way or another. Prioritizing nuclear+renewables just means that those energy production receive a premium for their production, which hopefully encourages further investment in building out more in renewables, which in turn continuously brings down the cost of consumption until it returns to equilibrium.

Maybe there's an argument in there somewhere around the lossiness of transmission, but I have no idea what it would be.

Bognar• 2 years ago

The production is physically limited, if you have the money and power to be green, the others are not and you can seriously slow down the transition.

This doesn't make sense. If big players are eating up all the renewable sources, then the renewable sources are making money hand over fist and are encouraged to expand. The market forces should speed up overall production of renewables, not slow it down.

em500• 2 years ago

Investors would make slightly less money in the short term

Why do you assume that the tax incidence falls on investors, rather than on customers and/or employees? With sales tax or VAT people tend to automatically assume 100% passthrough (so that the incidence falls completely on customers/consumers) even though they're also collected by companies. In reality taxes are borne by a combination of customers/employees/owners, with proportions determined by their relative price elasticities, rather than by who lawmakers appointed to collect the tax.

JumpCrisscross7• 2 years ago

taxes are borne by a combination of customers/employees/owners

And any green tax would be trivial for Google to add as a line item on invoices: it’s so defensible.

ClumsyPilot3• 2 years ago

Why do you assume that the tax incidence falls on investors, rather than on customers and/or employees?

Because they have huge investor surplus

chbint• 2 years ago

Indeed. The concentration of such a huge power consumption might make it easier (policy-wise) to take compensatory measures.

mrweasel2• 2 years ago

This could/should(?) be fixed by taxing CO2 emissions. I'm not sure what it works in e.g. the US, but some countries have this stupid idea that electricity prices have a build in CO2 tax, but applied to all consumptions, not just that produced by CO2 emitting sources.

Let's say Microsoft could save 25% on their electricity bill by consuming power from wind farms, I think they'd work out a way to do more AI training when the wind is blowing and scale down when more power is delivered from coal.

energy1232• 2 years ago

The ship has sailed on carbon taxes. It's good policy but voters don't like it, so politicians will never do it. Voters have shown to be okay with direct subsidies and permitting reform, so that's what we must do out of sheer pragmatism.

HumblyTossed• 2 years ago

I think they'd work out a way to do more AI training when the wind is blowing and scale down when more power is delivered from coal.

Maybe they could even use AI to help them figure out when to do that.

Y_Y• 2 years ago

I'd prefer that we priced in the externalities of emissions from pollution. If we should burn less coal then that can be acheived by taxing coal until it's again a net positive to society.

gottorf2• 2 years ago

our grandchildren will be able to live

Our grandchildren will be able to live regardless of where these companies source their power from.

szundi• 2 years ago

He meant a nice life

Ekaros• 2 years ago

Is that X% in moment or in total? Which is critical distinction. Overall might not be too helpful is renewables at time massively over produce. Electricity is fungible only in moment. And storage is nowhere close...

You could have someone getting paid to waste electricity during over-production while this wasted amount will somehow still count when coal is being burned...

constantcrying2• 2 years ago

It is ridiculous to place these demands on energy consumers. Microsoft and Google aren't operating heir own powerplants to generate energy in the quantities they need (some other companies, e.g. VW partially do), for that they are relying on other companies, which sell them their energy.

If and only if those other companies are able and willing to produce the required energy mix, then the desired mix used downstream can be achieved. Obviously the only organizations which can make such a change are energy providers.

jraph• 2 years ago

There's nothing obvious here.

The energy provider could say "why should I be the one eating the cost of providing sustainable energy?".

The ones consuming energy also need to take their responsibilities. "When we think that it would suffice people didn't buy it for it not to sell!" (Coluche).

In fact, this is a collective issue we are all part of (including as individuals: we use the services consuming energy).

tehmillhouse• 2 years ago

I'm not sure if investors will agree. The general way the stock market works heavily favors shortsighted thinking. They'll say après moi, le déluge and then package the déluge up into sellable financial instruments.

atiedebee• 2 years ago

This won't solve anything, you're just moving the non-renewable energy usage to all the consumers

blastonico• 2 years ago

hmm, but those fairly big countries are also heavy users of Google/Microsoft products, aren't they?

If every country had to create their own version of those products we would end up having still more power consumption - considering that not every one would be able to have the kind of professionals that Google and Microsoft have.

password4321• 2 years ago

"Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40859993

A click bait headline vs. content but a concern documented by the company.

amelius• 2 years ago

Huh, the "clickbaitiness" was debunked in the first reply to the first comment.

thinkindie• 2 years ago

Personally, I'm not much concerned about their energy consumption per se but rather by their energy mix. I would be more than fine if they had all their energy sourced from solar panels and wind turbines.

nicolaslem• 2 years ago

Since electricity is fungible at the continent scale, it only makes sense to look at the energy mix of society at large. Google could pay a premium to buy only renewable energy from the grid and have an impressive 100% green energy mix, simply displacing emission to the rest of us.

s1artibartfast2• 2 years ago

production isnt zero sum. If google buys up all the renewable power, more will be installed to supply green homeowners in Berkeley.

prepend2• 2 years ago

This makes sense as their market cap and revenues are also larger than many countries.

Max Barry wrote a book in 2003 called Jennifer Government [0] about a near future where companies were so big they had their own armies and intelligence agencies. It seems like we’re getting close to that point.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government

2OEH8eoCRo0• 2 years ago

That ain't new. East India company had essentially private armies.

tantalor• 2 years ago

Carnegie Steel had the Pinkertons

ClumsyPilot3• 2 years ago

And what a glorious time period that was, lawless and brutal.

infecto2• 2 years ago

We are getting close to companies with armies and intelligence agencies at the scale of governments?

prepend2• 2 years ago

I think Apple and Google probably has a more robust intelligence organization than most developing nations.

Fortunately, no armies yet.

galdosdi• 2 years ago

Any other millennials remember the pre-ajax CGI and <frame> based web game based on the book where you made your own countries and alliances and chose tax policy and stuff?

Come to think of it 2003 was only a couple years before Gmail would change web apps forever

spyspy• 2 years ago

The article doesn’t break out Google/MS proper from their cloud offerings, so it’s not really fair to say they’re using more power like the folks at these companies are choosing to do this. They rent compute and their customers are using a lot more of it. If google just said “we’re not renting out GPUs to save the environment” people would just shift to a competitor.

eesmith• 2 years ago

The calculation is a bit more complex than that.

Google and Microsoft gain from the economy of scale. With many more companies, the overall costs would be higher, and no doubt some people would decide to not use this service.

That's the heart of the Jevon's Paradox.

Devasta• 2 years ago

Depends on what they are doing. Consuming a large amount of energy for cloud platforms isn't the worst, as that'd be done by the customers directly if the cloud didbt exist after all.

Using it on generative AI on the other hand is burning huge amounts of energy, manpower and effort on a robot that advises how to cook spaghetti in gasoline for flavor. A complete waste.

taftster• 2 years ago

I wonder though, if compute was solely on-premise, would we be using so much of it?

My instincts tell me that because the cloud is so easy to spin up new computation resources, that we're just using that much more of it. If a company had to buy the hardware, buy the licensing, buy the time of the system administrator, would they scale up as large?

The cloud has driven efficiency gains. But those gains have been consumed and, under the premise above, even exceeded. The cloud might very well be contributing to more energy use than it would have otherwise.

Unsure on this, of course. Just a gut feeling. It would be interesting if someone did an actual study on this.

icegreentea2• 2 years ago

"Fairly big countries" is such a cop out. What do you mean by big? Population? Economy? Energy consumption?

The original twitter post just says "More electricity than many countries". The fact that Google and Microsoft consume the same order magnitude of electricity as Nigeria (population 220 million), Ireland (population 5 million), Ecuador (18 million), Slovakia (5 million), Iceland (population 0.4 million), really just speaks the vast inequality in the world, even amongst countries.

It's interesting and relevant that Microsoft and Google are now "country scale", in terms of energy production. But when you realize that US energy consumption in 2023 was 4000TWh (MS and Google apparently each used 24), you realize just how non-serious this comparison is. The comparison can be thought provoking, but the actual results aren't particularly meaningful.

bufferoverflow• 2 years ago

A country with the population 220 million is big, no matter how you slice it.

ClumsyPilot3• 2 years ago

Ireland is sizeable first world country, the rest is polemics

tgtweak• 2 years ago

I think the reality is that they are running the workloads of all of the customers of GCP and Azure collectively - and provided they're offsetting those emissions and hosting them with green energy where possible - it should be a net win for the environment that they're hosting this much infra. It also encourages prioritization on systematic efficiency improvements where possible. I think google was one of the first providers to publish and push for PUAs of their datacenters close to 1.0.

They also have programs in place for e-waste recycling and safe refrigerant destruction where it is available - things that you will not see in colocation-type facilities.

dr_kiszonka• 2 years ago

Something bugs me about this framing. I see that it can be useful, but Google's power consumption is not independent of, e.g., Spain's consumption. Big tech's power consumption is, largely, our power consumption minus development (which, like AI, can be high).

Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries

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