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Google’s electricity use and emissions skyrocketed last year due to its aggressive AI infrastructure buildout, according to the company’s most recent environmental impact report.
“The biggest change to our environmental impact is the expansion of our technical infrastructure — and the energy needed to operate it,” reads the report.
The report adds that in the years since 2019, Google’s electricity demand has risen by a staggering 250 percent, an increase chalked up to the “accelerating growth” of Google products and services including Cloud, Search, YouTube, and — yes — its “AI capabilities.”
“This rapid expansion in energy demand is a reality we must manage actively,” the report continues, “and we’re committed to ensuring that the growth of AI doesn’t become a rationale for lowering our environmental standards.”
Between 2024 and 2025, the company’s electricity demand experienced a 37 percent year-over-year bump; that’s ten percent more than its 27 percent increase from the previous year. Greenhouse gas emissions, meanwhile, experienced an 18 percent rise, which Google mainly credited to the manufacturing of AI hardware.
The report is the latest to underscore the pressure that AI, which now underpins the American economy, is putting on existing energy infrastructure and an already deeply burdened climate. As companies including Google push to install new AI data centers across the country, Americans — who really hate data centers — continue to rail against them. That intense public pushback, of course, is one of the reasons why Google and other AI competitors have proposed building data centers in space.
In its report, Google cushions this troubling uptick in its environmental impact by couching the stark figures in language about AI’s promise as a “powerful tool for global climate action” and claims about how its AI efforts are “unlocking meaningful societal and economic benefits.” The report also points to Google efforts to make its data centers more energy and water efficient.
The reality, though, is that currently, AI is serving as an excuse for Google to lower its environmental standards. And while the company has invested significantly into clean energy, it’s clear that the search giant — which is still gunning to win the ongoing AI arms race — sees its rapidly-climbing environmental footprint as a necessary evil in the near-term. Without comprehensive AI regulation in place, that’s entirely Google’s bet to make.
More on AI and the environment: AI Will Consume as Much Water as a Billion People By 2030, UN Report Estimates