No wonder Google is desperate for more power: the company’s data centers more than doubled their electricity use in just four years.
The eye-popping stat comes from Google’s most recent sustainability report, which it released late last week. In 2024, Google data centers used 30.8 million megawatt-hours of electricity. That’s up from 14.4 million megawatt-hours in 2020, the earliest year Google broke out data center consumption.
Google has pledged to use only carbon-free sources of electricity to power its operations, a task made more challenging by its breakneck pace of data center growth.
And the company’s electricity woes are almost entirely a data center problem. In 2024, data centers accounted for 95.8% of the entire company’s electron budget.
Image Credits:Tim De Chant/TechCrunch
The company’s ratio of data-center-to-everything-else has been remarkably consistent over the last four years. Though 2020 is the earliest year Google has made data center electricity consumption figures available, it’s possible to use that ratio to extrapolate back in time. Some quick math reveals that Google’s data centers likely used just over 4 million megawatt-hours of electricity in 2014. That’s growth of seven-fold in just a decade.
The tech company has already picked most of the low-hanging fruit by improving the efficiency of its data centers. Those efforts have paid off, and the company is frequently lauded for being at the leading edge. But as the company’s power usage effectiveness (PUE) has approached the theoretical ideal of 1.0, progress has slowed. Last year, Google’s company-wide PUE dropped to 1.09, a 0.01 improvement over 2023 but only 0.02 better than a decade ago.
It’s clear that Google needs more electricity, and to keep to its carbon-free pledge, the company has been investing heavily in a range of energy sources, including geothermal, both flavors of nuclear power, and renewables.
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Geothermal shows promise for data center operations. By tapping into the Earth’s heat, enhanced geothermal power plants can consistently generate electricity regardless of the weather. And many startups, including Google-backed Fervo Energy, are making it possible to drill profitable wells in more places.
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