SAN FRANCISCO – The technology industry built its climate credentials on a decade of renewable energy contracts, carbon offset purchases, and net-zero pledges signed when artificial intelligence demand was still manageable. Google and Amazon published data this week that shows how thoroughly the AI boom has undone that framework.
Google’s total carbon emissions rose 25 percent year over year in 2025, according to its sustainability report released this week. Amazon’s rose 16 percent. Both companies attribute the increases primarily to data center expansion driven by AI demand. Both are retreating from the renewable-first posture they maintained for years, moving toward a fuel they spent considerable effort distancing themselves from: natural gas.
The headline figures understate the problem. Google’s Scope 3 emissions, the indirect carbon produced across the full supply chain required to manufacture and operate AI hardware, doubled since the company’s 2019 baseline. They rose by 2.1 million metric tons last year alone. Scope 3 accounting was the mechanism through which the tech industry’s renewable energy purchases were supposed to generate systemic, supply-chain-wide carbon reduction. The direction in Google’s own data is now reversed.
Amazon added more data center capacity in 2025 than any other company on earth. The total surpassed 1.2 gigawatts in the fourth quarter alone, the company’s disclosure said: “To meet strong customer demand, in 2025 we added more data center capacity globally than any other company.” That pace does not align with what existing clean energy contracts can supply. The gap between what the grid can deliver from renewable sources and what AI infrastructure now demands is being filled, in the United States and Western Europe, with natural gas.
Capital investment in AI infrastructure is accelerating across every major technology company with no sign of a pause. The vertical integration underway across the sector now extends into power infrastructure itself. Natural gas is being chosen because it can be contracted and brought online at the speed the AI build-out requires. Renewable generation, at the scale and reliability AI data centers need, cannot.
The Scope 3 problem is structurally harder to address than the direct emissions figures suggest. Cutting-edge AI chips require semiconductor manufacturing processes that use fluorinated greenhouse gases with warming potentials thousands of times greater than carbon dioxide over a twenty-year horizon. The factories producing those chips, concentrated in Taiwan, South Korea, and mainland China, run on power grids that remain heavily dependent on coal. Every AI chip produced begins its commercial life as a substantial emissions event that does not appear in headline sustainability numbers. Apple’s deepening reliance on Chinese chip suppliers for its next device generation illustrates how thoroughly AI hardware is embedded in manufacturing ecosystems that renewable energy certificates do not reach.
Steel and cement for data center construction compound the Scope 3 exposure further. A data center at AI scale is simultaneously a large construction project, a hardware procurement chain, a cooling infrastructure installation, and a continuous power draw that must operate around the clock regardless of what renewable sources are generating at any given moment. The reinforced concrete in server room floors, the steel in cooling towers, and the copper in electrical distribution systems all carry embodied carbon that is rarely reported and never included in headline annual emissions figures. It grows with every quarter of accelerated build-out.
According to reporting by TechCrunch analyzing both sustainability disclosures, the corporate response has been notable for what it omits. Neither Google nor Amazon has revised its net-zero target dates. Neither has published a credible quantitative account of how the gap between current emissions trajectories and stated pledges will close. Investor pressure on ESG classification of large-cap technology stocks is building in European markets, where sustainability disclosure rules are tightening even as US requirements have loosened.
What neither company has said yet: whether the net-zero targets will be revised, restructured around a different baseline year, or quietly discarded. The sustainability reports released this week make the trajectory visible in concrete enough terms to make that question unavoidable. Whether the answer arrives as a formal revised commitment or a set of targets simply allowed to expire without comment is what the companies have not decided. The AI build-out that produced the current numbers has not paused. The pledges it is outpacing remain officially in force.
