Google’s 10th Annual Environmental Report

This year’s most important highlight demonstrates a pivotal milestone: We reduced our data center energy emissions by 12%. 1

Delivering record clean energy while investing in future energy breakthroughs

Despite a 27% increase in electricity demand to power our data centers, we successfully decoupled our operational energy growth from its associated carbon emissions. This was largely due to more than 25 clean energy projects we’d contracted over the past several years — some as far back as 2019 — coming online in 2024. Together, they added 2.5 gigawatts of new clean energy to the grids that served our operations last year. That’s roughly equivalent to more than 4 million solar panels. 2 This record investment pushed our carbon-free energy use from 64% to 66% on an hourly basis, 3 proving that with focused effort, it’s possible to power AI and all our products and operations with cleaner energy as we scale.

We continue to build on these gains. In 2024, we made our largest-ever procurement of clean energy, adding 8 gigawatts to our portfolio, more than we’ve ever done in a single year. 4 But you can’t run the future on yesterday's infrastructure and grid. Powering the next wave of innovation — especially AI — requires us to solve some of the most significant challenges of our time: not only generating vast amounts of clean, reliable energy, but also using it efficiently.

So we’re focused on building and operating the world’s most energy-efficient data center infrastructure, optimizing our models and hardware to use less electricity, and pushing the frontiers of advanced energy development.

In 2024, Google data centers used 84% less overhead energy than the industry average. 5 And we’re leading the industry in making AI models better, faster and more efficient, for example through techniques like quantization which have sped up large-language model training efficiency by 39%. 6 Ironwood is our seventh-generation and most powerful, capable, and energy efficient Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) — using nearly 30 times less energy than our first Cloud TPU from 2018. 7

We’re also actively investing in the creation of next-generation solutions like advanced nuclear and enhanced geothermal. These powerful energy sources ensure we can continue to promote economic growth and, most importantly, build and deliver the benefits of AI to people all over the world.

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