Is artificial intelligence smothering sustainability goals in their sleep? The revolution brought upon by the public emergence of generative AI has changed more than one business roadmap. While everyone and their dog have pushed the integration of some sort of AI service, the dark side of this AI ubiquity is the explosion of energy consumption associated with these power-guzzling tasks. That reality has become clear for Google, which has reported greenhouse gas emissions rising a whopping 48% over the past five years. The major change between 2019 and the present day is the appearance of gen AI, which has increased datacenter energy consumption—one of the factors cited by Google for this rise in its latest Environmental Report for 2024. This…