It’s no secret that AI is a hog, consuming energy and water like no digital technology before. We now know how much Big Tech’s pursuit of AI is costing the environment.

Both Google and Amazon released their sustainability reports this week and the numbers aren’t pretty. Every company has committed to reducing their carbon emissions to zero in the coming years, but AI has made those goals much more difficult to achieve. Google’s total carbon emissions have increased 25% since last year, Amazon’s have increased 16%.

A close reading of the reports suggests that both Amazon and Google will have to make some serious and potentially costly adjustments to their businesses if they want to meet their net-zero emissions goals.

Neither company directly blames AI for the rise in emissions, but there is plenty of indirect evidence.

AI at the center of everything

Both Amazon and Google acknowledge that their energy use has increased significantly in the last year as the use of AI has increased. Both talk about carbon intensity (essentially, how much pollution a company generates for every dollar of revenue it generates), a metric China has used in recent years when negotiating climate treaties even as its emissions were soaring. And both spend several pages promoting how AI can benefit the environment, a case of “protesting too much,” to borrow something from Shakespeare.

The picture becomes clearer the deeper you go into the data. Both companies are actually doing well when it comes to carbon pollution from energy purchases. Years of purchasing renewable energy have helped keep things in check, although that may change in the near future as technology companies, including Google, have begun investing heavily in natural gas power plants to keep pace with AI energy demands.

Rather, most of Amazon and Google’s growing carbon footprint comes from so-called Scope 3 emissions, a general category that covers pollution that a company does not directly control, such as the goods and services it buys or the products it sells. For companies like Amazon and Google, Scope 3 includes things like GPU purchases and the use of a company’s products, such as phones and tablets.

Google groups together two categories of Scope 3 emissions (capital goods and use of products sold), although it admits that the latter is small enough to not be material. (Most of Google’s hardware products are small devices that don’t consume much electricity.) That probably leaves data centers as the main driver. Last year, Google’s Scope 3 emissions increased by 2.1 million metric tons, meaning they are now double what they were in 2019, the year Google uses as a benchmark when evaluating its performance.

Amazon’s growing Scope 3 emissions come primarily from capital goods, fuels and energy. The first may include data centers and warehouses, which may help explain why Amazon’s Scope 3 emissions increased more than Google’s. Still, a good portion are probably data centers. “To meet strong customer demand, in 2025 we added more data center capacity globally than any other company, including more than 1.2 gigawatts (GW) in the fourth quarter alone,” Amazon wrote in the report.

hit a wall

That kind of spending helps explain why decarbonization is suddenly becoming much more difficult. For years, the biggest contributor to its carbon footprint was power for more modest-sized offices and data centers. This could easily be negated by purchasing renewable energy.

AI has changed that approach. While technology companies could still use renewable energy and batteries to power their data centers, they are starting to turn to fossil fuels. It’s a trend that will make their net-zero emissions promises much harder to meet, but it’s not irreversible.

The most harmful emissions come from the construction and equipment of the data centers themselves. The steel and cement industries are big polluters, and while startups are working on low- or zero-carbon approaches, they are not yet ready to deliver at the scale that technology companies need.

Then there are GPUs and memory chips driving the rise of AI. Semiconductor manufacturing uses a lot of energy and many of the world’s most advanced chip factories are located in Asia, where power grids remain dominated by fossil fuels. To make matters worse, many of the chemicals used in those factories are also potent greenhouse gases, capable of warming the atmosphere thousands of times more than an equivalent amount of CO.₂. The chip binge has likely inflated Amazon and Google’s carbon footprints.

None of these problems are intractable, although Amazon, Google and their peers have their work cut out for them. To meet their net-zero emissions promises, they will need to increase their renewable energy purchases, invest heavily in advanced steel and cement manufacturing, and purchase many millions of tons of carbon removal credits. It’s still possible, but the adoption of AI hasn’t made it easier.