Considering my website is being hit many times a day by hack attempts from bots running on google's cloud platform I'm sure that's part of it too. Anyone with a little money can apparently run a botnet off their servers.

I hate modern reporting.

So, ok, here we go, fact checking dot lemmy dot com.

Tihs one seems to come from Google's 2025 environmental report, which the article mentions but does not link despite being publicly available. The message Google would like you to take here is that while their power consumption has increased significantly their emissions have not (key chart below).

I guess that's what you get for trying to spin these things. You get spun right back.

Anyway, Google would also like you to know that:

“However, it’s important to note that our growing electricity needs aren’t solely driven by AI. The accelerating growth of Google Cloud, continued investments in Search, the expanding reach of YouTube, and more, have also contributed to this overall growth.”

This tracks. While power consumption seems to be speeding up a bit, it's been climbing for a while pretty consistently. I don't know of Google's implication that less CO2-heavy power generation is enough to not have to care about it, but I also don't really see a way to reverse this trend. Data centers are data centers, and whether they're crunching AI numbers or running every spreadsheet in the world, a bunch of big companies are committed to continuing to own a disproportionate chunk of the computing power of the entire planet so they can sell it to you by the minute.

I’m guessing they are trying to catch up to AI via brute force?

Fusion powered AI, what’s up dystopia!

Sometimes I think AI is going to just sink us all with all the resources it requires.

Although to be fair, we were doing a good job of killing the planet before AI was on the rise.

I was wondering about this. AI info on every search seems ridiculous

Google talk a lot about future renewables and nuclear energy projects, but they're increasing energy consumption before those projects start producing energy.

So Google rely on burning lots of fossil fuel to power its fast AI developments, meaning their AI plans are increasing pollution and aggravating climate change.

There were and still are into quantum computing.

They are absolute champions of tech-washing and green-washing.

It's literally anything to say, do and spending money on to make people forget that their core business is actually advertising.