Microsoft, Amazon, and Google collectively belched 119 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere last year, roughly a third of the entire nation of France, because we needed faster chatbots. Their emissions jumped nearly a fifth in a single year. And all three companies, hand on heart, say they are absolutely still on track for net zero.
The Numbers Are Genuinely Staggering
Let's put this in terms a human brain can actually process. The Guardian reports that in the financial year ending March 2026, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google together emitted 119 million metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent. The year before, that figure was roughly 101 million metric tonnes, which at the time was comparable to the entire annual output of Czechia. They burned through a whole extra Czechia's worth of carbon in twelve months.
Microsoft's individual emissions jumped 25% to 20 million metric tonnes, which the company attributed to, quote, 'the expansion of our datacentre infrastructure.' Google reported an 18% increase. Amazon clocked a 16% overall rise and a 20% spike in supply chain emissions, which covers the actual physical construction of the datacentres going up around the planet. Amazon's sustainability report still described this as 'making progress' toward its net zero goal of 2040. Progress. Right.
The source of all this is no mystery. The world's biggest tech companies are on course to spend $765 billion this year alone, mostly building AI datacentre infrastructure. JLL, a property consultancy, expects around 1,200 datacentres to be constructed globally between now and 2030. The Uptime Institute, which rates and inspects these facilities, estimates that major datacentre projects announced just last year would collectively consume 1.3% of the world's total electricity usage. That's nearly double current datacentre demand, and the majority of new power requirements will come from American projects.
The 'Green AI' Marketing Machine Is Working Overtime
Here is where it gets philosophically nauseating. Google, in the same breath as reporting an 18% emissions increase, argued that its AI systems helped reduce emissions elsewhere by 41 million tonnes of CO2 last year. So the pitch is: yes, we are making the problem worse, but we are also the solution to the problem we are making worse. You almost have to admire the audacity.
Cecilia Rikap, an economics professor at University College London, was considerably less impressed. Speaking to The Guardian, she said the ecological sustainability claims from Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are 'a marketing strategy.' She went further, pointing out something genuinely important that gets buried in all the net zero pledges: when other companies migrate to these cloud platforms, they effectively offload their own AI and digital carbon footprint to the tech giants. The pollution doesn't disappear. It just gets laundered through someone else's sustainability report.
'Governments should remember these expanding carbon footprints when the very same companies offer addressing the ecological crisis with AI solutions,' Rikap said. That is a sentence worth reading twice. The companies accelerating the carbon crisis are also selling governments the AI tools supposedly designed to fix it.
The Carbon Credit Market Is Also Quietly Imploding
As if the raw emissions numbers weren't enough, there's a second problem quietly developing in the background. Shaolei Ren, a professor of electrical engineering at UC Riverside, told The Guardian that Microsoft's own sustainability report hints at a shrinking supply of carbon credits on global markets. The mechanism that lets big companies say 'we offset our emissions' is itself running short.
Ren put it plainly: 'While companies are actively investing in or purchasing carbon credits, the figure suggests a possible lack of credit supply in the carbon market to meet the technology companies' needs.' The physical infrastructure bottlenecks, the power grid constraints, the permitting fights in communities that don't want a massive server farm next door, those get talked about constantly. The quiet exhaustion of the virtual offset market gets almost no attention. Both problems are real. Both are getting worse at the same time.
The Net Zero Promises Are Becoming a Joke in Slow Motion
All three companies still publicly maintain their net zero targets. Google and Microsoft have pledged to hit net zero by 2030. Amazon has set 2040 as its deadline. These are not small ambitions. They require reversing current trends sharply and soon, not at some hazy future point.
Prior to the current AI boom, Microsoft's emissions had actually flatlined at around 16 million metric tonnes in both 2023 and 2024. There was something that at least resembled progress. Then the AI investment wave hit, and the number shot to 20 million metric tonnes in a single year. Google's 2030 target is now four years away. Its emissions are going in precisely the wrong direction at increasing speed. The math does not work, and every executive who reads their own sustainability report knows the math does not work.
What's remarkable is the sheer consistency with which these announcements get framed. Emissions up 25 percent? 'Driven primarily by datacentre expansion.' Emissions up 16 percent? 'Making progress.' The language of accountability wrapped around numbers that describe the opposite of accountability. It's an art form.
The Dingo Take
Here is the core absurdity of this moment. We are watching three of the wealthiest corporations in human history pump historic volumes of carbon into the atmosphere at an accelerating rate, specifically to power a technology they are simultaneously marketing to governments as the key to solving the climate crisis. That is not a tension they are quietly managing. That is the sales pitch. The product causing the problem is being sold as the cure.
The 'net zero by 2030' promise from Google and Microsoft deserves to be treated as what it currently is: a number on a press release that is moving further from reality every quarter. No serious person looking at a 25% single-year emissions jump and a drying carbon credit market thinks 2030 net zero is a live target. At some point, journalists, regulators, and governments need to stop reporting these pledges alongside the emissions data as if they carry equal weight. One is a measurement. The other is a wish.
The real tell is Amazon describing a 20% spike in supply chain emissions as 'making progress.' That sentence should be exhibited in a museum. It captures everything about how big tech communicates about climate: technically not a lie, functionally meaningless, and delivered with total confidence that nobody will push back hard enough to matter. Rikap is right. Governments negotiating with these companies over AI contracts and climate solutions should tape that phrase to the wall of every meeting room: 'making progress.'
