Google's environmental report pointedly avoids AI's actual energy cost

Google has issued its 2024 Environmental Report, a more than 80-page document describing all of the massive company’s efforts to apply tech to environmental issues and to mitigate its own contributions. But it totally dodges the question of how much energy is AI using — perhaps because the answer is “way more than we’d care to say.”You can read the full report here (PDF), and honestly it’s got a lot of interesting stuff in it. It’s easy to forget how many plates a company as big as Google keeps spinning, an ...