Pichai added that he knew the “road ahead would not be easy,” but Google “aimed to prove that a carbon-free future is both possible and achievable fast enough to prevent the most dangerous impacts of climate change.”
“Today, I’m proud to announce that we intend to be the first major company to operate carbon free — 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year,” he said, in a video announcement .
Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai stood smiling in a leafy-green California garden in September 2020 and declared that the IT behemoth was entering the “most ambitious decade yet” in its climate action.
Genna Schnurbach, an external spokesperson for Google, referring to the report , told us: “As you can see from the document, Google is still committed to their ambition of net zero by 2030.”
An investigation by Canada’s National Observer has found that Google’s net-zero pledge has quietly been scrubbed, demoted from having its own section on the site to an entry in the appendices of the company's sustainability report.
Five years on, just how hard Google’s “energy journey” would become is clear. In June, Google’s Sustainability website proudly boasted a headline pledge to achieve net-zero emissions by 2030. By July, that had all changed.
By tracing back through the history of Google’s Sustainability website, we found that the company edited it in late June, removing almost all mention of its lauded net-zero goals. (A separate website referring to data centres specifically has maintained its existing language around net-zero commitments.)
Five years ago, Google’s climate action ambitions were the gold standard for Big Tech. Then, with power demand spikes from AI data centres, in July it scrubbed its sustainability website of its 2030 net zero pledge.
The page on Operating Sustainably has been rebranded to Operations, and the section on net-zero carbon was deleted. In its place is a new priority area: Energy.
“Running the global infrastructure behind our products and services, including AI, takes considerable energy,” said Google in its Environment 2025 report, which explained that it will be almost impossible to meet its erstwhile net-zero ambitions, partly due to its expansion in AI.
These significant removals come as Big Tech is racing to build new, power-devouring, hyperscale data centres to capitalize on the global boom in artificial intelligence. They are also coming at a time when the Trump administration has targeted institutions that have environmental ambitions.
“While we remain committed to our climate moonshots, it’s become clear that achieving them is now more complex and challenging across every level — from local to global,” the Google report authors state. In the same report last year, Net Zero Carbon was a key priority.
First in Big Tech to make net-zero pledge
Google, which has data centres in Toronto, Ont., and Montreal, Que., was one of the first tech giants to set sweeping sustainability goals — and it appears to be one of the first to be considering sweeping them out of sight. The latest sustainability reports from Big Tech peers, Microsoft and Amazon, by contrast, still present net-zero emissions as a headline priority area.
Canada's National Observer used the online tool Wayback Archive to examine the history of Google's operating sustainability page, discovering that it no longer lists net-zero as a headline priority area.
Google’s yearly electricity consumption increased by 26 per cent in 2024 to 32.2 terrawatt-hours, which is almost as much as the consumption of Ireland. Last month, it released a technical report which revealed that a single chat message to its Gemini AI model consumes 0.24 watt-hours of energy, equivalent to 2.4 minutes of running a small LED bulb.
A recent report from McKinsey & Co calculates that by 2030, it will cost $6.7 trillion worldwide in new investment to keep pace with the exploding demand for computing power. Data centres equipped to handle AI processing loads will need $5.2 trillion in investment, the consultancy predicted.
The stratospheric rise in forecasted AI workloads could drive about 70 per cent of new electricity demand, McKinsey found, with the estimated global data centre capacity demand in its “mid-range” scenario expected to rise 3.5-fold to close to 250 gigawatts by 2030. In the US, this means the sector would account for almost 12 per cent of total national energy demand, up from just over five per cent today.
McKinsey & Co
“The pressure to get any possible source of electricity is rather overwhelming right now, especially in the developed world, which hasn't touched its grid for 40 years,” Michael Barnard, a prominent clean energy technology analyst and self-styled climate futurist, told Canada’s National Observer.
This pressure was explored in a recent report from the New Climate Institute, a think-tank, which found that the tech sector is facing a "climate strategy crisis," where emissions targets have “lost their meaning amid soaring energy demand.”
AI power demand growth slows climate action
For some in the sector, the power demand growth linked to AI expansion has become incompatible with their existing environmental commitments. And this inconvenient truth has coincided with the reelection of Donald Trump, whose administration has signalled it will roll back climate policies, and whose allies have disparaged corporate sustainability efforts as part of a “woke agenda.”
Barnard noted “there's a lot of pandering to Trump going on," referring to Google chief investment officer Ruth Porat championing expansion of the use of “incredibly clean” coal plants and other fossil fuels for its future power data centres. Pichai himself attended Trump’s inauguration, to which Google donated $1 million.
But Barnard pointed to the fact that Google continues to sign corporate power purchase deals for various renewable energy sources, including hydropower, offshore wind and even advanced geothermal.
“Bit of a tight rope for Google,” he said, adding: “Watch what everyone actually does as opposed to what they say when dealing with Trump.”
Still image from Google's original video where Sundar Pichai presents the tech giant's 2030 net-zero pledge
John Lang, co-founder of the Net Zero Tracker, a data analysis firm that focuses on fact-checking net zero in every nation and the largest cities and companies around the globe, told Canada's National Observer that he believes the world is temporarily in what he dubs a "net-zero recession"– but it hasn’t caused companies to abandon climate action.
“What we're seeing is we are seeing some backtracking, but it's highly concentrated in two sectors: finance and fossil fuels,” Lang said.
In other sectors, Lang said corporations are now recalibrating their early sustainability goals to be more realistic and reduce reliance on carbon credits. This, he added, is “a really, really good thing.”
Google, whose parent company Alphabet has a market cap of US$2.79 trillion, has taken a more ambiguous approach. Despite removing its net-zero headline from its Sustainability website, the company insists that it remains committed to its 2030 goal — which relies heavily on carbon offsetting. An external PR representative for Google declined to reply to Canada’s National Observer’s challenge of her claim that it was “still committed” to net zero by 2030, despite the pledge being demoted to an appendix.
The UN’s High Level Expert Group on the Net Zero Emissions Commitments of Non-State Entities released a report in 2022, which found that unrealistic sustainability pledges “erode confidence in net zero pledges overall” and “undermine sovereign state commitments.”
Lang is more sympathetic to “stretch goals,” like Google’s climate moonshots, as long as the deadlines are set close in the future, as they can motivate urgency.
“It still needs to be realistic. You still need to be able to deliver it,” he added. He praised Google’s decision to invest $200 million in durable carbon removals as setting a positive precedent for other companies.
It is unclear whether Google’s decision to delete its net-zero pledges from its Sustainability website sets a more worrying precedent.
Lang is convinced the setbacks are only temporary and rapid emissions reductions will soon be reprioritized. “It's our one and only solution to climate change. It's as simple as that. There's no other option.”