As technology gets implemented into more aspects of daily life and society, it may seem strange to imagine how this magical digital world located in the “cloud” could ever harm the environment — especially when thinking of grimy fossil fuels, deforestation, and water pollution. However, every single email in your inbox and comment made on an Instagram post, contributes to the internet’s giant carbon footprint on Earth.
When you take a picture that gets automatically saved to some cloud or create a Google Doc that automatically saves to your Google Drive, where do you think it is really getting saved? From your side of the screen, it may seem that your files are just staying put in magical storage, but in reality, all that memory is zooming through fiber optic cables underneath the ocean to giant data servers that are running 24/7.
Since these data server engines create massive amounts of heat, cooling systems are vital to quell the threat of the heat destroying the computers. AC/water chilling systems are the major cooling systems that these data centers rely on, but ironically, they need to burn carbon to create this cooling. This cooling actually takes up 40% of the electricity run by the data centers, so the more people that use these servers, the more electricity is spent on cooling.
This has only gotten worse with the development of AI. In an article with NPR, Jesse Dodge, a senior research analyst at the Allen Institute for AI, said, “One query to ChatGPT uses approximately as much electricity as could light one light bulb for about 20 minutes”. AI resources like ChatGPT require much more electricity than normal search engines because of the amount of processing that they have to do.
We can already see drastic increases in carbon emissions by large tech companies because of their investments in AI. Specifically, Google released a sustainability report that said its greenhouse gas emissions rose by 48% between 2019 and 2023.
Companies like Google and Microsoft have been claiming for years that they have goals of reducing their carbon emissions to net zero, or even net negative emissions, by 2030. However, the explosion of AI has derailed these sustainability plans, because it provides a profitable opportunity for tech companies to advance and gain an edge in competition.
Although this seems discouraging, UX can actually make a huge difference in how individuals using the internet can reduce their carbon footprint. This emerging approach to UX is called “Sustainable UX” or “Green UX”.
