Why Big Tech companies got quiet on climate change

Google’s sustainability webpage once specifically mentioned the company’s goal to reach net-zero emissions by 2030, and included a subpage titled “operating sustainably.”

But that pledge has disappeared from the main page, which now highlights the company’s commitment to artificial intelligence. The subpage was renamed “our operations.”

Google maintains that it is still aiming for a 2030 goal, though executives have acknowledged that the growth of AI makes it challenging.

Still, the change to the sustainability page is an example of how tech companies are being a bit quieter about their climate goals as they expand their use of AI. 

The explosive growth of data centers to support the AI surge is “calling into question” whether the major tech companies—Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon—can meet their pledges to reduce emissions, according to a 2025 corporate responsibility report from the NewClimate Institute.

Already, companies are reporting emissions increases in their annual sustainability reports. 

Along with complicating their climate goals, the AI push seems to be changing how Big Tech talks about, and even considers, the climate.

These companies are “just in a rush to build out as much as they can, and to stay ahead of the competition with new trends with AI,” ​​says Thomas Day, one of the report’s authors, who analyses such commitments for the NewClimate Institute. “Climate appears to be the last thing that they’re thinking about.”

Emissions targets have ‘lost their meaning’

When that NewClimate report came out in June 2025, it warned that tech companies’ emissions targets “appear to have lost their meaning and relevance.”

It did note that some companies, like Microsoft and Google, had “promising” strategies for how to power data centers with renewable electricity. But already, that outlook is out of date.

“Those [companies] that we identified before as having more constructive or ambitious positions have gone relatively quiet,” Day says, “while those pushing for more problematic approaches really doubled down.”

Microsoft’s emissions could surge 44% due to just one West Virginia data center that will run entirely on natural gas, according to Stand.earth research. 

Google also recently announced it will use natural gas to power a massive Texas data center, which could emit, according to one calculation, as much as 4.5 million tons of carbon dioxide a year—more than the entire city of San Francisco. 

In 2023, Amazon’s operational carbon emissions grew 182% compared to three years prior, according to a 2025 United Nations report, due to higher energy demands to power data centers. Amazon continues to announce new data center investments.

Big Tech says AI will help climate goals

The five major tech companies all have net zero or carbon neutral commitments by either 2030 or 2040.

These companies maintain that they’re committed to those goals and working on sustainability.

A Microsoft spokesperson said the company is still committed to being carbon negative, water positive, and zero waste by 2030, and that it continues to expand its clean energy portfolio.

A Meta spokesperson said “We’re working towards our goal to achieve net zero emissions across our value chain in 2030.”

But online, its language has changed: Meta’s sustainability page previously said the company “commit[s] to reaching net zero emissions” by 2030. Now, the page says “we have set a goal to achieve net zero emissions” by then.

And as Big Tech talks about sustainability, it often does so in conjunction with AI.

“We remain committed to our ambitious moonshot of reaching net-zero emissions across our operations and value chain,” a Google spokesperson said without specifying a timeline. “Reaching this moonshot will be non-linear and has become increasingly complex. We’re working to build efficiency into every layer of our infrastructure, catalyzing new energy sources like nuclear, geothermal and battery storage, and using AI itself to accelerate climate solutions. ”

“Rather than viewing AI as a barrier to sustainability, we see it as an opportunity to pioneer solutions at scale,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “We’re harnessing the power of AI to help us find science-based solutions at a rapid pace while remaining committed to our goal of net-zero carbon by 2040.”

The spokesperson added that Amazon is “diversifying its carbon-free energy portfolio, including our first investments in nuclear energy.”

A 2025 Microsoft blog noted that its sustainability goals were a “moonshot,” and “nearly five years later, we have had to acknowledge that the moon has gotten further away.” Then it said that the same thing making those goals less attainable now will bring them closer in the future: AI.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

Claims that AI will solve climate change often lack scientific evidence, according to a 2026 report by multiple climate groups. Tech companies also tend to lump together “traditional AI” with the more environmentally harmful generative AI when making such statements, that report said. 

The actions that tech companies are taking to develop data centers and expand AI are “simply not in line” with their climate pledges,” Day says. 

“The priority seems to be, put up as many data centers as you can, wherever you can, and make sure there’s enough immediate power to run it,” he says. “And that’s, in almost all cases, going to be gas.”

The AI data center boom is directly linked to an increase in natural gas development. The U.S. now has the most gas-fired power capacity in development (including projects that have been announced as well as those in preconstruction and/or construction), according to Global Energy Monitor—with more than a third of that capacity slated to directly power data centers.

Regulatory changes could alter climate targets

It’s not that tech companies are abandoning their climate pledges, Day notes. But in some cases, they’ve omitted prhases, or changed how they talk about climate.

“It feels a bit more like they just put their head in the sand, and no one is really putting pressure on them to clarify their climate pledges,” he says. “The regulatory environment at the moment is not exactly conducive to holding them accountable.”

The system of accounting for corporate emissions is currently being revised, and those changes may force companies to reassess their climate goals.

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol, which provides emissions accounting and reporting standards for corporations, currently gives companies two ways to count Scope 2 emissions, which are the indirect emissions from a company’s purchase of electricity, steam, heat, or cooling: the location-based method or the market-based method.

Location-based refers to the emissions associated with the grid where that energy is consumed. The market-based method means companies can “artificially reduce the emissions they report,” Day says, by buying renewable energy certificates. 

Take a data center in Ireland, for example. At night in the winter, renewables can’t do much to power that data center—but the company that owns it could buy a certificate from solar panels in the summer based in Spain to claim that that data centers’ emissions are zero.

Several companies only report market-based emissions, Day says, and they purchase enough of those certificates to report zero emissions. This is why it can be difficult to glean how well tech companies are doing to reduce emissions based on their own reports. 

In its most recent sustainability report, for example, Google said it reduced its data center emissions by 12%, but that was calculated through the market-based method.

But the standards are considering changes that would mean companies can only claim renewable energy certificates from places in the same location, and concerning electricity generated at the same time.

“That will make it far more difficult to make these kind of misleading claims,” Day says. “But it’ll also change the targets that companies set, because many of them have just set 100% renewable energy targets, knowing that they can just buy these certificates for peanuts when they have very little impact in reality.”

(The Amazon spokesperson said that it wants to ensure its climate effort is “pointed towards decarbonizing the overall electricity system, and that goes far beyond the power that we consume and where we consume it.”)

Kicking the climate can down the road

This potential change to emissions accounting may be one reason why tech companies are quieter about their climate goals. If that rule goes through and they have to revise their pledges, they may not want to be loud about their current goals.

Day questions if counting emissions is even the right framework for tech companies in the AI age, though. 

Through AI, Big Tech companies are becoming more like financial institutions or marketing companies. They may not have large emissions footprints themselves, but what does matter is who they sell their products to—if they are financing fossil fuel expansion, or doing advertising work for oil companies, for example.

Similarly, if an AI tool is being used to ramp up fossil fuel production, or even to improve algorithms that drive up environmentally harmful overconsumption, that’s an impact that goes beyond direct emissions. 

When it comes to Big Tech, we need to ask “What can climate leadership look like for these types of companies?” Day says. 

“I think it really requires them to be a bit more selective about how they use AI, and I don’t see it as a very good political environment right now for that discussion,” he notes.

Tech companies may be kicking the climate can down the road, figuring that they’ll work it out after the manic rush of the AI buildout cools off. But the planet may not have that time. 

“It’s quite a frustrating moment for all this to be happening the way it is, because we didn’t get as far as we needed to as a society on all of these objectives over the last 10 years,” Day says. 

“What we did achieve in the last 10 years was to get a lot of companies talking about climate change, and get them setting targets,” he adds.

Opinions about how impactful that was differ, but mentioning climate change seemed to become a norm in business discussions. 

What needed to happen around 2024, however, was for those pledges to turn more into “high-quality action.” By that time, though, the AI boom was beginning, and companies got on board.

“There was the narrative two years ago when this all started to say, ‘Hey, don’t worry so much about our emissions. Look the look how much of a force for good we are, or we can be,'” Day says. But now, “I rather get the sense at the moment that tech just doesn’t talk about climate.”