Tech Giants Struggle with Climate Goals Amid AI Boom

Six years ago, Google confidently declared it would power all operations with clean electricity by 2030 and remove as much pollution as it produced. Today, that ambitious target has been downgraded to what the company now calls a “moonshot.” Similarly, Microsoft maintains it will remove more carbon than it creates by 2030 but has reframed the effort as “a marathon, not a sprint.”

The race to deploy artificial intelligence is fundamentally complicating tech companies’ greenhouse gas reduction commitments. As they rush to build sprawling data centers that can consume more power than entire cities, tech giants find themselves in a difficult position: maintaining climate pledges while meeting the enormous energy demands of AI infrastructure.

“Even if they haven’t officially revised their goals, they are starting to acknowledge that, ‘Yeah, we’re maybe not on track,'” said Patrick Huang, a senior analyst at Wood Mackenzie.

The reality, according to Huang, is that companies must now use whatever power sources they can to stay competitive—and increasingly that means natural gas, which is primarily methane, a potent greenhouse gas that drives climate change.

While tech companies purchased record amounts of clean energy in 2024 and 2025, according to the Clean Energy Buyers Association, their total emissions have risen substantially in the roughly five years since making their climate commitments. Google’s emissions jumped nearly 50%, Amazon’s increased by 33%, Microsoft’s rose more than 23%, and Meta’s grew by over 60%, according to their sustainability reports.

Data centers are consuming an ever-larger share of electricity in the United States—about 4.6% of total U.S. electricity in 2024, a figure that could nearly triple by 2028, according to government estimates. Some analysts predict nationwide electricity use to rise as much as 20% in the next decade, with data centers representing a significant driver of that growth.

Several factors are complicating tech companies’ climate goals: a backlog of projects awaiting permission to connect to power grids, and efforts by the Trump administration to sideline renewable energy, potentially prolonging reliance on fossil fuels.

“Each of these alone could be real challenges,” said Julie McNamara, associate policy director at Union of Concerned Scientists’ Climate & Energy program. “Together, it’s just creating a real near-term crunch on the system.”

Natural Gas Use Spikes as AI Soars

Tech companies emphasize they’ve made significant progress through energy-efficiency measures, renewable energy purchases, and requiring suppliers to reduce their emissions. However, natural gas in 2024 accounted for more than 40% of electricity powering U.S. data centers, while coal supplied 30% globally, according to the International Energy Agency.

The trend shows no signs of slowing. Utilities are planning natural gas plants around the country specifically to supply data centers, while some tech companies are building on-site gas plants dedicated solely to powering their facilities.

“Companies are scrambling to try to get as much power as they can as quickly as possible,” said Lori Bird, director of the U.S. Energy Program at the World Resources Institute. “It’s a mad rush and a lot of competition for resources.”

Microsoft President Brad Smith told The Associated Press that he remains “confident in our ability” to meet the company’s 2030 carbon removal goal by investing in carbon-free energy sources, including nuclear, solar, and hydropower.

In Wisconsin, two new natural gas plants helping power a Microsoft data center will be offset by solar investments elsewhere in the state. Similarly, Meta is using three natural gas plants to supply electricity to its massive data center in rural Louisiana while investing in solar elsewhere.

Google is pursuing investments in wind, hydropower, battery storage, and advanced nuclear, though it also relies on natural gas. One notable project involves buying electricity from a natural gas plant to be built at the Archer Daniels Midland corn processing plant in Decatur, Illinois, where carbon dioxide emissions would be captured and stored underground.

Meeting clean energy goals partially depends on power purchase agreements and renewable energy certificates. However, this approach could become more challenging under proposed reporting requirement changes that would mandate energy sources be in the same region as a company’s data center and match hours of operation—solar credits, for example, could only be applied to daytime operating hours.

Although some new gas plants will replace dirtier coal facilities, these investments take about 30 years to recover, effectively delaying the transition to clean and renewable energy. This comes at a time when the United Nations Environment Programme warns that high-emitting countries are unlikely to meet their own targets. AI was partially blamed for a 2.4% increase in U.S. fossil fuel emissions last year, according to a study by the Rhodium Group.

“It is only because of these data centers that these gas plants are being built,” McNamara emphasized. “There are no two ways about it.”

Trump Administration Policies Complicate Tech Goals

Securing sufficient electricity was challenging even before President Donald Trump took office and began targeting renewable energy.

The administration has canceled grants and permits for solar and wind projects, eliminated tax breaks for renewable energy—which advocates say can be built more quickly and less expensively than gas or nuclear plants—and ordered several coal-fired power plants scheduled for retirement to continue operating.

Many companies set climate goals expecting federal tax credits would support wind and solar deployment, said Rich Powell, CEO of the Clean Energy Buyers Association. However, these credits will expire in July after being eliminated by the Republican-controlled Congress and Trump administration.

Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax,” has argued that green energy is unreliable and expensive and could harm national energy independence.

Josh Parker, sustainability chief for chipmaker Nvidia, contends that AI will eventually reduce electricity consumption because it’s more efficient than traditional computing. He warned that curtailing energy development could cause the U.S. to fall behind on AI development.

“Our perspective is that we need an all-of-the-above approach to energy,” Parker said.

Tech companies would have struggled in 2020, when many established their goals, to forecast current energy needs since much of the technology used to train AI models—which consume most data center electricity—was just being introduced, according to Jay Dietrich, an AI sustainability researcher at the Uptime Institute.

By 2023, Dietrich said, tech companies “had a pretty good idea things were going to get a lot more exciting… and that the numbers were going to grow quickly.”

He expects many will extend their emissions goal timelines, based on a 2025 Uptime Institute survey showing a 12% drop in operators confident they could meet 2030 carbon-neutral targets. Nevertheless, even with increasing emissions, the largest companies should be able to afford enough renewable energy and offsets to achieve carbon neutrality.

McNamara said the surge in electricity demand from data centers has transformed a challenge into “an outright crisis.”

“Tech companies are allowing implicitly or explicitly an enormous increase in fossil fuel dependence under their watch and because of their actions,” she concluded.