A warning sign about the true cost of AI, courtesy of Google and Amazon

It’s no secret that AI is an energy and water hog like no other digital technology before it. Now we know how costly Big Tech’s pursuit of artificial intelligence is to the environment.

both of them Google and Amazon They released their sustainability reports this week, and the numbers aren’t pretty. Every company has pledged to zero out its carbon emissions in the coming years, but artificial intelligence is making achieving these goals more difficult. Google’s total carbon emissions have risen by 25% since then last yearAs for Amazon shares, they rose by 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 achieve their net-zero emissions goals.

Neither company has insisted on blaming AI directly for rising emissions, but there is plenty of indirect evidence.

Artificial intelligence is at the heart of everything

Amazon and Google both admit that their energy use has increased dramatically in the past year as the use of artificial intelligence rises. Both talk about carbon intensity — basically, how much pollution a company generates for every dollar of revenue it brings in — a metric China has used over the past several years when negotiating climate treaties even as its emissions have been rising dramatically. They both devote several pages to promoting how AI can benefit the environment, a case of “protesting too much,” as Shakespeare put it.

The picture becomes clearer the deeper you delve into the data. Both companies actually do quite well when it comes to carbon pollution from energy purchases. Years of renewable energy purchases have helped keep things under control, although that may change in the near future with the emergence of technology companies. Including GoogleI’ve started Invest heavily In natural gas power plants to keep pace with artificial intelligence energy requirements.

Instead, most of Amazon and Google’s growing carbon footprint comes from so-called Scope 3 emissions — an umbrella category that covers pollution that the company doesn’t 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 purchasing a GPU and using the company’s products, like phones and tablets.

Google combines two categories of Scope 3 emissions — capital goods and use of products sold — although it acknowledges that the latter is small enough to not be material. (Most Google hardware products are small devices that don’t consume much electricity.) That would likely leave 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 baseline when evaluating its performance.

Amazon’s increasing Scope 3 emissions come mostly from capital goods, fuels and energy. The former could include data centers and warehouses, which could help explain why Amazon’s Scope 3 emissions are higher than Google’s. However, data centers are probably the good part of it. “To meet strong customer demand, in 2025 we added more data center capacity globally than any other company, including more than 1.2 gigawatts in the fourth quarter alone,” Amazon wrote in the report.

Hit the wall

This kind of spending helps explain why decarbonization has suddenly become more difficult. For many years, the largest contributor to their carbon footprint has been providing energy to modest-sized offices and data centers. This can easily be eliminated by purchasing renewable energy.

Artificial intelligence has turned this approach on its head. While technology companies can still use renewable energy sources in addition to batteries to power their data centers, they are beginning to rely on fossil fuels. It’s a trend that will make meeting their net-zero pledges more difficult, but it is not irreversible.

The most harmful emissions come from building and equipping the data centers themselves. The steel and cement industries are heavy polluters, and while startups are working on low-to-zero carbon approaches, they are still not ready to implement at the scale that technology companies need.

Then there are the graphics processing units and memory chips that power the AI ​​boom. Semiconductor manufacturing uses a lot of energy, and many of the world’s leading chip factories are located in Asia, where fossil fuels still dominate electrical grids. To make matters worse, many of the chemicals used in these factories are also powerful greenhouse gases, capable of raising the temperature of the atmosphere thousands of times more than an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. The overeating of chips has likely inflated the carbon footprints of both Amazon and Google.

None of these problems are insurmountable, although Amazon, Google, and their peers face significant challenges. To meet their net-zero pledges, they will have to increase their purchases of renewable energy, invest heavily in advanced steel and cement manufacturing, and buy millions of tons of carbon removal credits. It’s still possible, but their embrace of AI hasn’t made it any easier.