Google's Carbon Emissions Soar as AI Drives Energy Consumption

Google's carbon emissions just went up again

Google's carbon emissions jumped yet again as the company continues to push ahead in AI. The company's 2025 sustainability report emphasizes that its "ambition-based emissions" grew 11 percent last year to reach 11.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution, marking a 51 percent increase compared to 2019. That puts Google farther away from its goal of slashing planet-heating pollution in half by 2030 compared to a 2019 baseline. But what it calls "ambition-based" emissions excludes certain categories of supply chain pollution it considers out of its control or"peripheral" to the core business of Alphabet, Google's parent company. That includes certain purchased goods and services and food programs. A table buried in the report's appendix shows that its total emissions actually reached 15,185,200 metric tons of carbon dioxide. That's roughly equivalent to the emissions from nearly 40 gas-fired power plants over a year. Google's report also highlights a 12 percent reduction in carbon emissions from data centers, even though its energy usage continues to rise thanks to AI. Despite the decrease, carbon emissions from data centers are still far higher when compared to 2019. In its report, Google cites several factors outside its "direct control" that are making it more challenging to achieve its climate goals. That includes the "rapid evolution of AI" that could make the company's "future energy needs and emissions trajectories more difficult to predict." It also calls out changes to climate and energy-related policies, "slower-than-needed" deployment of carbon-free energy technologies, and a lack of carbon-free energy solutions in certain markets. "These external factors could affect the cost, feasibility, and timeline of our progress -- and navigating them requires flexibility," Google writes. AI is driving up energy usage at other companies like Microsoft and Meta, and the technology is on track to consume more power than Bitcoin by the end of this year. Though AI companies like DeepSeek are aiming to create more energy-efficient models, that prospect isn't stopping companies like Meta from building a massive, gas-powered data center in Louisiana. President Donald Trump has also signed an executive order promoting the use of coal to power AI data centers.

Google's emissions up 51% as AI electricity demand derails efforts to go green

Google's carbon emissions have soared by 51% since 2019 as artificial intelligence hampers the tech company's efforts to go green. While the corporation has invested in renewable energy and carbon removal technology, it has failed to curb its scope 3 emissions, which are those further down the supply chain, and are in large part influenced by a growth in datacentre capacity required to power artificial intelligence. The company reported a 27% increase in year-on-year electricity consumption as it struggles to decarbonise as quickly as its energy needs increase. Datacentres play a crucial role in training and operating the models that underpin AI models such as Google's Gemini and OpenAI's GPT-4, which powers the ChatGPT chatbot. The International Energy Agency estimates that datacentres' total electricity consumption could double from 2022 levels to 1,000TWh (terawatt hours) in 2026, approximately Japan's level of electricity demand. AI will result in datacentres using 4.5% of global energy generation by 2030, according to calculations by the research firm SemiAnalysis. The report also raises concerns that the rapid evolution of AI may drive "non-linear growth in energy demand", making future energy needs and emissions trajectories more difficult to predict. Another issue Google highlighted is lack of progress on new forms of low-carbon electricity generation. Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), miniature nuclear plants that are supposed to be quick and easy to build and get on the grid, have been hailed as a way to decarbonise datacentres. There were hopes that areas with many datacentres could have one or more SMR and that would reduce the huge carbon footprint from the electricity used by these datacentres, which are more in demand due to AI use. The report said these were behind schedule: "A key challenge is the slower-than-needed deployment of carbon-free energy technologies at scale, and getting there by 2030 will be very difficult. While we continue to invest in promising technologies like advanced geothermal and SMRs, their widespread adoption hasn't yet been achieved because they're early-stage, relatively costly, and poorly incentivised by current regulatory structures." It added that scope 3 remained a "challenge", as Google's total ambition-based emissions were 11.5m tons of CO₂-equivalent gases, representing an 11% year-over-year increase and a 51% increase compared with the 2019 base year. This was "primarily driven by increases in supply chain emissions" and scope 3 emissions increased by 22% in 2024. Google is racing to buy clean energy to power its systems, and since 2010, the company has signed more than 170 agreements to purchase over 22 gigawatts of clean energy. In 2024, 25 of these came online to add 2.5GW of new clean energy to its operations. It was also a record year for clean energy deals, with the company signing contracts for 8GW. The company has met one of its environmental targets early: eliminating plastic packaging. Google announced today that packaging for new Google products launched and manufactured in 2024 was 100% plastic-free. Its goal was to achieve this by the end of 2025. In the report, the company also said AI could have a "net positive potential" on climate, because it hoped the emissions reductions enabled by AI applications would be greater than the emissions generated by the AI itself, including its energy consumption from datacentres. Google is aiming to help individuals, cities and other partners collectively reduce 1GT (gigaton) of their carbon-equivalent emissions annually by 2030 using AI products. These can, for example, help predict energy use and therefore reduce wastage, and map the solar potential of buildings so panels are put in the right place and generate the maximum electricity.

Google's data centers using more power than ever before as AI surge continues

Google has published its latest Sustainability Report, revealing how it is becoming increasingly apparent the desire for cloud and AI services is causing huge spikes in electricity demand. The company says it used around 32.1 million MWh in 2024, 30.8 million MWh of which was consumed by its data centers - a staggering 95.8% of its total consumption, and more than double the amount of energy its data centers used in 2020 (14.4 million MWh), just before the explosion of AI tools adoption to consumers on a huge scale. Looking back even further, Google's data centers used an estimated four million MWh of electricity in 2014, marking a colossal 7x increase over the course of the past decade. The report added the total electricity consumption for Google rose 27% year-over-year in 2024, following a 17% increase announced in its 2023 report. However the company stressed it's making good progress towards cleaning up its energy supply despite the huge growth. Despite increasing demand, data center energy emissions were reduced by 12% in 2024 through a combination of clean energy initiatives and data center efficiency improvements. The amount of compute per unit of electricity has risen by around 6x over the past five years, with 2024 power usage effectiveness closing in on the theoretical minimum of 1.0 - in 2024, it was 1.09. Google explained that, at this scale, even a 0.01 improvement could have considerable positive consequences. Moreover, Google maintains 100% renewable energy matching globally - something that it's been doing since 2018. The report details how clean energy purchases in 2024 avoided 8.2 million metric tons of CO2e emissions. The company recently signed 60 new contracts worth around eight gigawatts in new clean energy, including a geothermal plant in Nevada, solar projects in South Carolina and Oklahoma, and upcoming nuclear reactors. Although Google continues to make meaningful progress, increasing demand highlights the challenges that the tech giant faces. Looking ahead, Google is piloting carbon-intelligent computing to shift compute tasks to cleaner regions or times.

Google undercounts its carbon emissions, report finds

Research says Google's carbon emissions went up by 65% between 2019-2024, not 51% as the tech giant had claimed In 2021, Google set a lofty goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2030. Yet in the years since then, the company has moved in the opposite direction as it invests in energy-intensive artificial intelligence. In its latest sustainability report, Google said its carbon emissions had increased 51% between 2019 and 2024. New research aims to debunk even that enormous figure and provide context to Google's sustainability reports, painting a bleaker picture. A report authored by non-profit advocacy group Kairos Fellowship found that, between 2019 and 2024, Google's carbon emissions actually went up by 65%. What's more, between 2010, the first year there is publicly available data on Google's emissions, and 2024, Google's total greenhouse gas emissions increased 1,515%, Kairos found. The largest year-over-year jump in that window was also the most recent, 2023 to 2024, when Google saw a 26% increase in emissions just between 2023 and 2024, according to the report. "Google's own data makes it clear: the corporation is contributing to the acceleration of climate catastrophe, and the metrics that matter - how many emissions they emit, how much water they use, and how fast these trends are accelerating - are headed in the wrong direction for us and the planet," said Nicole Sugerman, a campaign manager at Kairos Fellowship. The authors say that they found the vast majority of the numbers they used to determine how much energy Google is using and how much its carbon emissions are increasing in the appendices of Google's own sustainability reports. Many of those numbers were not highlighted in the main body of Google's reports, they say. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the figures. The authors behind the report, titled Google's Eco-Failures, attribute the discrepancy between the numbers they calculated and the numbers Google highlights in its sustainability reports to various factors, including that the firm uses a different metric for calculating how much its emissions have increased. While Google uses market-based emissions, the researchers used location-based emissions. Location-based emissions is the average energy the company consumes from local power grids, while market-based emissions include energy the company has purchased to offset its total emissions. "[Location-based emissions] represents a company's 'real' grid emissions," said Franz Ressel, the lead researcher and report co-author. "Market-based emissions are a corporate-friendly metric that obscures a polluters' actual impact on the environment. It allows companies to pollute in one place, and try to 'offset' those emissions by purchasing energy contracts in another place." The energy the tech giant has needed to purchase to power its data centers alone increased 820% since 2010, according to Kairos' research, a figure that is expected to expand in the future as Google rolls out more AI products. Between 2019 and 2024, emissions that came primarily from the purchase of electricity to power data centers jumped 121%, the report's authors said. "In absolute terms, the increase was 6.8 TWh, or the equivalent of Google adding the entire state of Alaska's energy use in one year to their previous use," said Sugerman. Based on Google's current trajectory, the Kairos report's authors say the company is unlikely to meet its own 2030 deadline without a significant push from the public. There are three categories of greenhouse gas emissions - called Scopes 1, 2 and 3 - and Google has only meaningfully decreased its Scope 1 emissions since 2019, according to the Kairos report. Scope 1 emissions, which include emissions just from Google's own facilities and vehicles, account for only 0.31% of the company's total emissions, according to the report. Scope 2 emissions are indirect emissions that come primarily from the electricity Google purchases to power its facilities, and scope 3 accounts for indirect emissions from all other sources such as suppliers, use of Google's consumer devices or employee business travel. "It's not sustainable to keep building at the rate [Google is] building because they need to scale their compute within planetary limits," said Sugerman. "We do not have enough green energy to serve the needs of Google and certainly not the needs of Google and the rest of us." As the company builds out resource-intensive data centers across the country, experts are also paying close attention to Google's water usage. According to the company's own sustainability report, Google's water withdrawal - how much water is taken from various sources - increased 27% between 2023 and 2024 to 11bn gallons of water. The amount is "enough to supply the potable water needs for the 2.5 million people and 5,500 industrial users in Boston and its suburbs for 55 days", according to the Kairos report. Tech companies have faced both internal and public pressure to power their growing number of data centers with clean energy. Amazon employees recently put forth a package of shareholder proposals that asked the company to disclose its overall carbon emissions and targeted the climate impact of its data centers. The proposals were ultimately voted down. On Sunday, several organizations including Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, League of Conservation Voters, Public Citizen, and the Sierra Club, published an open letter in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Seattle Times calling on the CEOs of Google, Amazon and Microsoft to "commit to no new gas and zero delayed coal plant retirements to power your data centers". "In just the last two years alone, your companies have built data centers throughout the United States capable of consuming more electricity than four million American homes," the letter reads. "Within five years, your data centers alone will use more electricity than 22 million households, rivaling the consumption of multiple mid-size states." In its own sustainability report, Google warns that the firm's "future trajectories" may be impacted by the "evolving landscape" of the tech industry. "We're at an extraordinary inflection point, not just for our company specifically, but for the technology industry as a whole - driven by the rapid growth of AI," the report reads. "The combination of AI's potential for non-linear growth driven by its unprecedented pace of development and the uncertain scale of clean energy and infrastructure needed to meet this growth makes it harder to predict our future emissions and could impact our ability to reduce them." The Kairos report accuses Google of relying "heavily on speculative technologies, particularly nuclear power", to achieve its goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2030. "Google's emphasis on nuclear energy as a clean energy 'solution' is particularly concerning, given the growing consensus among both scientists and business experts that their successful deployment on scale, if it is to ever occur, cannot be achieved in the near or mid-term future," the report reads. The Kairos report alleges the way that Google presents some of its data is misleading. In the case of data center emissions, for example, Google says it has improved the energy efficiency of its data centers by 50% over 13 years. Citing energy efficiency numbers rather than sharing absolute ones obscures Google's total emissions, the authors argue. "In fact, since 2010, the company's total energy consumption has increased 1,282%," the report concluded.