2024 Environmental Report Released

From the very beginning, we've been driven by a bold vision to forge a more sustainable future. A big part of that journey involves sharing our insights and being upfront about both our achievements and hurdles. This transparency is crucial, especially now, as technological innovation meets the pressing need for an energy transition.

Our Annual Environmental Report: Harnessing Technology for Positive Change

Our annual Environmental Report dives deep into how we're using technology, especially AI, to promote environmental sustainability and run our business responsibly.

Enabling AI for Sustainability

We understand that scaling AI to boost climate action is just as vital as managing its environmental impact. To reduce our footprint, we've developed cutting-edge, energy-efficient infrastructure tailored for the AI age. Our latest, Trillium, the sixth-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), boasts over 67% more energy efficiency than its predecessor, TPU v5e.¹ We've also pinpointed best practices that, when combined, can slash the energy needed to train an AI model by up to 100 times and cut emissions by up to 1,000 times.² These are practices we're actively using at Google.

Our goal is to create the most energy-efficient computing infrastructure in the world, while also being mindful of our water use and waste management. Our data centers are, on average, about 1.8 times more energy-efficient than typical enterprise data centers.³ In 2023, our data centers had an average annual power usage effectiveness of 1.10, well below the industry average of 1.58,⁴ which means we use about 5.8 times less overhead energy per unit of IT equipment energy.

Last year, we rolled out a water risk framework to better pinpoint climate-friendly cooling solutions, considering factors like carbon-free energy availability, watershed health, and future water needs. We view our expanding infrastructure not just as a challenge, but as a chance to spur innovations and investments toward a low-carbon economy.

AI's potential to drive climate action is enormous. It's estimated that AI could help reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 5–10% by 2030.⁵ We're focusing our AI efforts on three key areas:

• Organizing Information: Our fuel-efficient routing feature leverages AI to analyze traffic, terrain, and engine data to suggest the most efficient route. Since its launch in late 2021, it's helped reduce over 2.9 million metric tons of GHG emissions up to the end of 2023 — equivalent to removing about 650,000 fuel-based cars from the road for a year.⁶
• Improving Prediction: We've developed a groundbreaking global hydrological AI model that, when paired with public data, can predict floods up to seven days in advance across more than 80 countries, covering areas where over 460 million people reside.⁷ This helps communities better prepare for and respond to riverine floods.
• Better Optimization: Our AI-powered Green Light tool assists city traffic engineers in optimizing traffic light timings to reduce stop-and-go traffic and fuel consumption. It has the potential to cut stops by up to 30% and emissions by up to 10% at intersections.⁸

Through our products, we're aiming to help individuals, cities, and partners reduce 1 gigaton of carbon equivalent emissions annually by 2030, and we'll keep innovating to help communities adapt to climate change impacts.

Driving Sustainability Across Our Operations

In 2017, Google became the first major company to match 100% of its annual global electricity consumption with renewable energy, a feat we've repeated every year since.⁹ Building on two decades of progress, in 2020, we launched our most ambitious climate action plan yet for the next decade.

Our target is to achieve net-zero emissions across all our operations and value chain by 2030, supported by a commitment to operate on 24/7 carbon-free energy on every grid where we work. We're also pushing for water stewardship, a circular economy, and the restoration and enhancement of nature and biodiversity. This year's report highlights our continued progress:

• Ten of our grid regions achieved at least 90% carbon-free energy, and despite increased electricity demand from our data centers, we maintained a global average of 64% carbon-free energy. We're also proud of our pioneering enhanced geothermal project now contributing to the grid.¹⁰
• We signed agreements for about four gigawatts of clean energy capacity in places like Texas, Belgium, and Australia — the highest volume in any year to date.¹¹
• Our Google Renewable Energy Addendum encourages our major hardware manufacturing suppliers to commit to using 100% renewable energy by 2029.¹²
• Our water stewardship initiatives replenished around 1 billion gallons of water in 2023, representing 18% of our freshwater use that year and tripling our replenishment efforts from 6% in 2022.¹³
• For new Google products released in 2023, packaging was at least 99% plastic-free, and the packaging for our Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro is 100% plastic-free.¹⁴¹⁵

Building a Sustainable Future: Challenges and Commitment

Despite our strides forward, we're not without challenges. In 2023, our total greenhouse gas emissions rose by 13%, mainly due to increased data center energy use and supply chain emissions.

While we've made significant advances in clean energy across many grids, regions like Asia-Pacific still pose decarbonization challenges due to limited carbon-free energy availability. Moreover, there's often a lag between investing in clean energy projects and seeing the resulting emissions reductions. To keep pushing forward, we've recently introduced a clean transition rate to spur new clean energy projects in the U.S. and announced plans to enable 1 gigawatt of new solar capacity in Taiwan.

Achieving a sustainable future demands systemic change, robust government policies, and innovative technologies. We're dedicated to collaborating and doing our part, every step of the way.