- Google’s data centers spent 30.8 million MWh electricity in 2024
- It’s about a 2x increase from 2020 and 7x from 2014
- Google claims data center emissions fell by 12% year-over-year
Google has published its latest sustainability report, which reveals how it becomes more and more clear that the desire for cloud and AI services causes huge spikes in the electricity.
The company says it spent about 32.1 million MWh in 2024, of which 30.8 million MWh was consumed by its data centers – a staggering 95.8% of its total consumption, and more than twice the amount of energy used by its data centers in 2020 (14.4 million MWh), just before the explosion of AI tools adopted to consumers.
Looking back even further, Google’s data centers used four million MWh electricity in 2014, marking a colossal 7x increase over the past decade.
96% of Google’s energy consumption is from data centers
The report added total electricity consumption to Google, the 27% the year before by 2024 after a 17% increase that was announced in its 2023 report.
However, the company emphasized that it is making good progress towards cleaning up its energy supply despite the enormous growth.
Despite increasing demand, data center energy emissions were reduced by 12% by 2024 through a combination of pure energy initiatives and improvements in data center improvements.
The amount of calculation per Electricity unit has increased by approx. 6x over the past five years, when the efficiency of power consumption in 2024 closed the theoretical minimum of 1.0 – in 2024 it was 1.09.
Google explained that in this scale, even an improvement of 0.01 could have significant positive consequences.
In addition, Google maintains 100% renewable energy that matches globally – something it has been doing since 2018. The report describes how Rene Energy Purchase in 2024 avoided 8.2 million tonnes of CO2e emissions.
The company recently signed 60 new contracts worth about eight gigawatts in new pure energy, including a geothermal plant in Nevada, solar projects in South Carolina and Oklahoma and upcoming nuclear reactors.
Although Google continues to make meaningful progress, the rising demand highlights the challenges facing the technical giant. Looking ahead, Google Pilotes Carbon-Intelligent Computing to change calculating tasks to cleaner regions or times.
