is a senior science reporter covering energy and the environment with more than a decade of experience. She is also the host of Hell or High Water: When Disaster Hits Home , a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals.
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Amid a fierce debate about the environmental toll of artificial intelligence, Google released a new study that says its Gemini AI assistant only uses a minimal amount of water and energy for each text prompt. But experts say that the tech giant’s claims are misleading.
Google estimates that a median Gemini text prompt uses up about five drops of water, or 0.26 milliliters, and about as much electricity as watching TV for less than nine seconds, roughly 0.24 watt-hours (Wh), which produces around 0.03 grams of carbon dioxide emissions.
Google’s estimates are lower than previous research on water- and energy-intensive data centers that undergird generative AI models. That’s due in part to improvements in efficiency that the company has made over the past year. But Google also left out key data points in its study, leading to an incomplete understanding of Gemini’s environmental impact, experts tell The Verge.
“They’re just hiding the critical information.”
“They’re just hiding the critical information,” says Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside. “This really spreads the wrong message to the world.” Ren has studied the water consumption and air pollution associated with AI, and is one of the authors of a paper Google mentions in its Gemini study.
As a result, with Google’s water estimate, “You only see the tip of the iceberg, basically,” says Alex de Vries-Gao, founder of the website Digiconomist and a PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Institute for Environmental Studies who has studied the energy demand of data centers used for cryptomining and AI.
Google left out another important metric when it comes to power consumption and pollution. The paper shares only a “market-based” measure of carbon emissions, which takes into account commitments a company makes to support renewable energy growth on power grids.
A more holistic approach would be to also include a “location-based” measure of carbon emissions, which considers the impact that a data center has wherever it operates by taking into account the current mix of clean and dirty energy of the local power grid. Location-based emissions are typically higher than market-based emissions, and offer more insight into a company’s local environmental impact. “This is the groundtruth,” Ren says. Both Ren and de Vries-Gao say that Google should have included the location-based metric, following internationally recognized standards set by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.
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