Google touts its new AI assistant Gemini as eco-friendly, claiming minimal water and energy usage per text prompt, but critics argue the tech giant omits key data and its overall carbon emissions and resource usage keep rising despite efficiency gains.
Google unveils AI Inference Impact Metrics, a methodology quantifying the energy, emissions, and water footprint of AI inference tasks like Gemini text prompts, revealing median energy use of 0.24 watt-hours and emissions of 0.03 grams of carbon dioxide per prompt.
Gulf's booming AI hubs face a looming water crisis, with data centers projected to consume over 426 billion liters annually by 2030, straining the region's scarce freshwater resources as traditional cooling systems rely heavily on water.
Google DeepMind unveils AlphaEarth, an AI model that processes satellite data to generate detailed digital maps of the entire planet, enabling tracking of environmental changes and aiding conservation efforts by organizations like the UN.
AlphaEarth Foundations unveils a comprehensive digital twin of Earth's surface by integrating petabytes of data from satellites, radar, and climate simulations, enabling detailed mapping for ecosystem monitoring, agriculture, and more.
In a groundbreaking partnership, Saudi Aramco and Google AI firm SandboxAQ use quantum computing to transform carbon emissions into profitable products, making fighting climate change lucrative for oil giants and accelerating the shift to cleaner energy.
Chile leads a groundbreaking initiative, Latam-GPT, a multilingual AI model trained on over 8 terabytes of data from 30 Latin American and Caribbean institutions, embracing regional diversity by including Indigenous languages and dialect variants.
Surging energy demands from AI systems are straining power grids and fueling emissions, with data centers already consuming 2-4% of national electricity in major economies and AI potentially driving a 25-fold increase in the global tech sector's energy use by 2040.
Google and Microsoft report significant surges in greenhouse gas emissions, with increases of 48% and 29% respectively, driven by the energy-intensive demands of their expanding artificial intelligence operations and data center construction.
Meta unveils plans for massive water-guzzling data centers to power AI and pursue superintelligence, raising concerns over straining local water resources, potential shortages, and higher prices for communities.