Google’s investments in artificial intelligence and cloud computing services, coupled with tough market conditions for clean energy in Asia and the U.S., pushed its 2030 net-zero “moonshot” further out of sight in 2025.
Google reported an 18 percent leap in greenhouse gas emissions, largely fueled by computing hardware, steel, concrete and other supplies related to data center construction. That piles onto the 11 percent increase that the tech company reported in 2024.
Google’s cumulative emissions have risen more than 80 percent since 2019, the baseline year for the company’s “intentionally aspirational” pledge to cut its operational emissions and certain supply chain emissions in half by 2030.
Google’s electricity demand leapt 37 percent for the year, the largest increase in its history. Since 2019, the power consumed by its products and services has increased by 250 percent.
“While our long-term commitment to reducing our environmental impact remains the same, our progress is being shaped by rapid shifts in technology and the slow evolution of power grids,” Google said in its 2026 environmental report published on June 30.
Things could have been worse. Google figures that without its clean energy contracts — more than 35 gigawatts in total across solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear facilities — plus ongoing investments in hardware and software efficiency, its GHG emissions footprint for 2025 would have been five times larger. Because of its work on custom chips and computing equipment, Google said its data centers use 83 percent less “overhead” energy than the industry average.
The company is also making progress on water: the 7.7 billion gallons it replenished in 2025 represents 78 percent of its freshwater consumption. (It has pledged to replenish 120 percent.) Unlike Microsoft and Amazon, Google doesn’t report on water efficiency, although it is unusually transparent about site-level water use.
Under pressure
Google is the first of the big three AI and cloud computing services companies to report this year on progress towards its climate commitments.
Like the other two, Amazon and Microsoft, it is struggling to balance ambitious goals for emissions, water and waste reductions with the environmental impact of data centers purpose-built for AI. Concerns over electricity prices and water withdrawals are drawing heightened scrutiny and opposition from communities across the U.S.
To counter that narrative, Google leans heavily on messaging that plays up the potential of AI to reduce emissions for consumers, businesses and cities, primarily through improved efficiency.
For example, it estimates that features in Google Maps and Nest thermostats, along with seven other applications it offers, helped consumers and businesses cut 41 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2025, three times Google’s footprint.
Parent company Alphabet has also developed technologies to speed grid modernization; slow interconnections for new clean energy generation are a primary impediment to many companies’ emissions reduction plans, across all industries.
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