Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29%

Microsoft has released its 2024 Sustainability Report, and it's mostly bad news.

Last year, Microsoft's emissions went up 29%, and it used 23% more water, primarily due to "new technologies, including generative AI."
The report covers numbers for 2023, the first full year of the AI race after ChatGPT's November 2022 debut.

Microsoft invested a reported $10 billion in OpenAI in January 2023 and added GPT-4 to the Bing search engine in early 2023.

It's now full steam ahead on selling the Copilot AI assistant add-on for Microsoft 365 products while building a new AI model that consumes tons of electricity during the training phase alone.

More complex computations mean more data centers, which gobble up water for cooling and require vast amounts of electricity, creating "new challenges" for meeting the sustainability goals Microsoft put in place four years ago.

The vast majority of emissions cames from the supply chain, data centers, and "the use of our products across millions of our customers."
Microsoft says it is has replenishment projects that aim to offset the impacts, especially in "high water stress locations where we operate data centers," including the Colorado River Basin, which the LA Times calls a "dire" situation.

- CyberBeat