Big Tech’s Carbon Emissions Spike With Runaway Growth of AI

The greenhouse gas emissions of Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google spiked in 2025, pointing to a growing problem for the hyperscalers: reconciling their climate goals with the massive amount of energy required to power AI, much of it still generated from fossil fuels.

Amazon’s emissions rose 16% from 2024, the company said in a sustainability report released Wednesday. It emitted about 81 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent last year, roughly as much as the emissions from 19 million gas-powered cars on the road. The increase was driven by data center construction and fuel used for deliveries, the report said.

Google’s “ambition-based” emissions — a definition that excludes some parts of its supply chain — climbed 18% overall in 2025. Its Scope 1 emissions from its own operations, excluding purchased electricity, went up 20% compared to 2024, due in part to its expanding data center portfolio, the company said in its own sustainability report released Tuesday.

Amazon has a goal of reaching net zero by 2040, while Google is targeting 2030. As they balance AI’s power needs with sustainability, the companies report varying degrees of success.

Google’s electricity use went up by 37% last year, but it managed a small drop in its Scope 2 emissions from purchased power due to its sourcing of clean energy. Amazon, by contrast, said its emissions from buying electricity rose 34%.

Other tech giants are reckoning with the same challenge. Microsoft Corp. pledged to match 100% of its hourly electricity consumption with purchases of zero-carbon energy by 2030. Bloomberg News reported earlier this year that the company has weighed scaling back the commitment because of data center expansion.

Microsoft and Meta Platforms Inc., in their most recent reports published last year, cited emissions jumps of 23% and 64% respectively. Meta set a net-zero target for 2030 across its entire value chain.

Data centers’ hunger for power is helping drive up utility bills and spurring investment in US fossil fuel infrastructure, including natural gas power plants. SpaceX is using gas turbines to run its AI data centers in Tennessee and Mississippi.

But producing the hardware, concrete and steel used in the facilities is also energy intensive. Google, in its new report, reported a 25% rise in Scope 3 or supply-chain emissions from 2024 that it attributed mostly to hardware manufacturing and data center construction.

Critics argue the industry should be doing more to curb its carbon footprint.

“We’re essentially in a climate crisis and we should not be having emissions growth at all, arguably, and yet the data centers are going in the opposite direction,” said Sasha Luccioni, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Sustainable AI Group, which works to measure and limit the environmental impact of the sector.

Amazon and Google both said they remain committed to their sustainability targets. Google’s report noted that its path to net zero will not be linear, “given our AI infrastructure build out is currently accelerating faster than the grid is decarbonizing.”

“While the speed and scale of AI adoption is unique — and the change is happening faster and more broadly than anything else we’ve encountered in our lifetimes — the need to stay stubborn on our vision and flexible on the details is familiar territory,” Amazon’s Chief Sustainability Officer Kara Hurst said in its report.

This spring, activist investors asked Amazon, Alphabet and Meta in shareholder proposals to explain how they’re reconciling surging electricity demand for AI with their climate commitments. None of the proposals earned majority support.

Photo: Amazon Web Services data center in Boardman, Ore. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane, File)