Six HUNDRED sixty two percent? Good lord.
Google and Microsoft recently admitted their emissions are soaring as they build out data centers to power the AI boom. But analysis from The Guardian suggests the data center emissions of Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Apple are 662% higher than the companies are reporting.
Emissions from in-house data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple may be 7.62 times higher than official figures
Like, isn't it...illegal to lie that badly? Will there be any consequences for that kind of whopper? Even a slap on the wrist "fine"?
It's almost certainly higher than the companies are reporting, but I don't know that I'd necessarily trust the Guardian's analysis. A dozen years ago when I worked for Google, I remember outside news reports of "how much energy does a Google search cost" that were off by a factor of 10x.
Everywhere you look—politically, socially, in technology, in business practices—we (or rather, "we") seem to have made a decision ten or so years ago to turn hard into every available bad idea. Thus, this.