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Jennifer L. Schenker
Innovator Founder and Editor-in-Chief |
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Google said this week that its greenhouse gas emissions have surged 48% in the past five years due to the expansion of the data centers it uses to underpin artificial intelligence systems, leaving its commitment to get to Net Zero by 2030 in doubt. It is the latest big tech company to publicly reveal a struggle to reconcile its AI ambitions with climate goals.
Microsoft, which has invested billions of dollars into OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and is building its own AI tools,in May said its emissions have risen by almost a third since 2020, as the push to build out the infrastructure behind artificial intelligence threatens its climate goals. The nearly 30% increase in emissions was in large part due to the construction of the data centers that AI and cloud computing systems run on, Microsoft said in its annual sustainability report.
The computational power required for sustaining AI's rise is doubling roughly every 100 days. To achieve a tenfold improvement in AI model efficiency, the computational power demand could surge by up to 10,000 times. The energy required to run AI tasks is already accelerating with an annual growth rate between 26% and 36%. This means by 2028, AI could be using more power than the entire country of Iceland used in 2021.
Microsoft Co-founder Bill Gates recently claimed that artificial intelligence will be more of a help than a hindrance in achieving climate goals, despite growing concern that an increase in new data centers could drain green energy supplies.
Speaking at a June 27 conference in London hosted by his fund Breakthrough Energy, Gates told journalists that AI would enable countries to use less energy, even as they require more data centers, by making technology and electricity grids more efficient.
That may turn out to be prescient but to align the rapid progress of AI with the imperative of environmental sustainability, a meticulously planned strategy is essential, Beena Ammanath, a board member at the Centre for Trustworthy Technology, wrote in an essay published by The World Economic Forum in April. Read on to learn more about this story and other important technology news impacting business. |
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| When Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser said last March that gas and oil are here to stay, he was stating an inconvenient truth.
“We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas and instead invest in them adequately, reflecting realistic demand assumptions,” the CEO said to applause from the audience during a global energy conference in Houston.
Despite the world pumping more than $9.5 trillion into the energy transition over the past two decades, alternatives have been unable to displace hydrocarbons at scale.
Taking a broader perspective, the energy transition is, in fact, stalling, according to the 14th annual edition of the World Economic Forum’s report, Fostering Effective Energy Transition 2024. The report, published in collaboration with Accenture uses the Energy Transition Index (ETI) to benchmark 120 countries on the performance of their current energy systems that uses 46 indicators covering energy sustainability, security and equity.
While 107 out of 120 countries have progressed on the ETI over the last decade, there has been a slowdown in the transition due to economic and geopolitical volatilities in recent years that have impacted interconnected global energy systems and value chains.
The problem is not the technology readiness of key enablers like energy storage clean hydrogen, sustainable aviation fuels, carbon capture and many other clean technologies, says Maciej Kolaczkowski, who oversees the World Economic Forum’s Advanced Energy Solutions community. The real issue is an absence of compelling business cases.
Take the case of Aramco, which is also a producer of green hydrogen. There are few takers for this alternative product.
Nasser told delegates that, in energy terms, the cost of green H2 amounted to the equivalent of $400 per barrel oil- roughly five times the current price. He added that renewable hydrogen would only be affordable with a “significant amount of [government] incentives and offtake agreements of at least 15 years” — but that companies are wary of starting businesses that are only profitable with subsidies and would then be unable to make money if those were taken away.
It is little wonder then that Aramco, which has a market cap of $1.8 trillion and boasted $121 billion in profit last year, is not about to shut down its main line of business. |
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Who: Sangeet Paul Choudary is the founder of Platformation Labs and the best-selling author of Platform Revolution and Platform Scale. He has advised the leadership of more than 40 of the Fortune 500 firms and has been selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Choudary’s work on platforms has been selected by Harvard Business Review on four occasions in the HBR Top 10 Must Reads compilations. He is a frequent keynote speaker at leading global forums including the G20 Summit, the World50 Summit, and the World Economic Forum.
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Topic: Generative AI and competitive advantage.
Quote: "In today’s hype cycle, CEOs are scrambling to effectively communicate how AI will change their competitive advantage to investors. If you believe, as I do, that AI is increasingly getting commoditized, the question they should be asking is what is our competitive ecosystem and how does AI impact our ability to play in that ecosystem?"
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| Sweden’s Enerpoly has developed a zinc-ion battery technology from abundant, recyclable materials, such as zinc and manganese, resolving supply chain and price volatility issues, while promising reliable and economical energy storage. The company says its battery technology, which has non-flammable and non-explosive properties, is well-suited for use in challenging applications, such as critical infrastructure and densely populated urban areas. is in the process of building what it says is the world’s first megafactory for the manufacture of zinc-ion batteries and has already secured pilots for the batteries it will make with three major European utilities and two major battery system integrators. |
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| Number of AI patents filed by China from 2014 to 2023, according to a United Nations report released July 4. That’s six times more than those filed by U.S.-based inventors, the UN World Intellectual Property Organization said. After China the top AI patent-filing countries are the U.S. (6,276), Republic of Korea (4,155), Japan (3,409) and India (1,350). Generative AI patents currently make up 6% of total AI patents in the world, according to the report.
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