On July 9, sustainability reports from Microsoft, Amazon and Google showed their combined carbon emissions had risen nearly 18%, due to their AI datacenter energy demands and construction’s increased demand for electricity, equipment and building materials. The net-zero pledges are still on Big Tech giant’s websites but the emissions are in the atmosphere.
According to The Guardian, the distance between those two facts is one hundred and nineteen million metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent. The numbers revealed by the investigation is the collective carbon output of Microsoft, Amazon, and Google over the financial year ending March 2026, up nearly 20% from the year before and equivalent, by one calculation, to roughly a third of France’s entire national greenhouse gas output.
France has sixty-nine million people, with a heavy industry, agriculture, aviation, and a road network used by tens of millions of vehicles. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are generating a comparable footprint make software and rent computing time in their eyes.
The figures show how the race to build AI infrastructure is affecting the climate record of major cloud companies. Climate targets remain, yet emissions are rising as data centers are built faster than clean energy systems can support them.
Strictly speaking, the problem is not that these companies lied about their intentions. In a period when the energy demands of generative AI were either underestimated or not yet fully imaginable, most of the net-zero commitments were made in good faith.
The actual problem is more structural, and somewhat elegant, in its brutality because the infrastructure needed to scale large language models (LLMs) is growing faster than the electrical grids serving that infrastructure can decarbonize Big Tech’s supply. New datacenter energy demands that comes online draws power from a grid that is, in most geographies, still substantially fossil-fueled. Every chip fabrication cycle accelerated to meet demand runs on energy that renewables have not yet replaced.
The arithmetic has a way of cutting through the language that corporate sustainability communications have spent years carefully constructing.
AI Taking Carbon Emissions Higher
In the financial year ending March 2026, Microsoft, Amazon and Google produced 119 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, nearly 18% more than the 101 million tonnes reported a year earlier. The increase was linked to AI data centers that require electricity, construction material, cooling systems and backup power, and they train AI models and run chatbots.
Microsoft reported that its emissions rose 25% in 2025 to 20 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. The company said the increase was driven primarily by the expansion of their datacenter infrastructure.
“While AI infrastructure is driving demand for energy, water, land and materials, sustainability solutions are not scaling fast enough to meet demand,” Microsoft President Brad Smith and chief sustainability officer Melanie Nakagawa wrote. “This tension is real, and it is also productive.”
Google reported an 18% rise in total emissions, while its scope 3 emissions increased 25%. These indirect emissions, including hardware production, shipping and datacenter energy demands and construction, make up about 80% of Google’s carbon footprint.
Google Chief Sustainability Officer Kate Brandt said the company’s AI buildout is moving faster than power grids are becoming cleaner. She added that Google remains focused on expanding clean energy and technology that can reduce industry emissions.
Amazon reported a 16% rise in emissions and a 20% increase in supply chain emissions, including datacenter energy demands coming from building the needed foundation. The company still described its climate work as making progress towards net zero by 2040.
In other words, these Big Tech giants are caught, red handed, in a contradiction between their values and their behavior on the ground, but between two genuine imperatives built on competitive survival in an AI market where falling behind has existential consequences, and climate commitments that were announced when survival and sustainability seemed reconcilable.
Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have now discovered, at scale and in public, that they are not. Not yet. Possibly not soon. The gold rush, it turns out, has a carbon cost that the gold rush’s winners are only beginning to fully account for.
Net-Zero Targets Face a Technology Test
Slowing AI expansion could weaken the companies’ position in a competitive market. But also, remaining on the trajectory and at the current pace could make their climate goals harder to defend.
“Governments should remember these expanding carbon footprints when the very same companies offer addressing the ecological crisis with AI solutions,” said Cecilia Rikap, an economics professor at University College London, highlighting that the companies’ claims about sustainable cloud services are nothing but a marketing marketing strategy.
Rikap also warned that companies moving data and AI systems to large cloud providers may hide their environmental impact.
The scale of construction may deepen the problem. JLL, a US property consultancy expects about 1,200 data centers to be built worldwide by 2030, with most demand driven by AI.
The Uptime Institute estimates that projects announced last year could use 1.3% of global electricity, nearly doubling current data center demand.
Shaolei Ren, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, said the emissions increases were connected to AI investment. He also warned that technology companies may face a shortage of carbon credits as they try to offset growing pollution.
Microsoft and Google still aim to reach net zero by 2030, while Amazon has set a 2040 target. Yet the reports suggest those promises depend on whether clean energy, carbon removal and efficient data centers can grow as quickly as AI itself.
For now, the sector remains caught in a loop: the more AI expands, the more infrastructure it needs, and the harder it becomes for technology companies to cut emissions while keeping their climate promises.
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