Google’s exponential path to climate-wrecking digital bloat – Ketan Joshi

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I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from Google’s latest climate report, but holy hell, I did not expect this.

The company’s total electricity consumption jumped from 31 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2024 to 43 TWh in 2025. This is very easily the biggest increase in their electricity consumption ever , and it puts them way ahead of Microsoft. It is almost certainly a reflection of the obscene energy hunger of their ever-expanding bloated generative AI systems, and a vindication of the warnings we’ve been raising for several years now.

I’ve updated all the report figures in my data tracking page, here. For the first time, I’ve compiled Google’s electricity consumption back to 2011, to give a historical view of what is happening here, because my description does not do this justice:

Amazon stopped disclosing their data a few years ago

To give you some sense of scale here, this is what Google’s current consumption looks like, relative to the energy consumption of a bunch of country’s power grids:

Google’s power consumption rose by 7 TWh between 2023 and 2024. That was bad. But it rose by a whopping 12 TWh between 2024 and 2025, almost double last year’s increase. Google’s power consumption isn’t just growing – the rate at which it is growing is growing. We have a word for this: exponential growth.

Every time I look at this chart I have to go and double check every single Google number, because it just looks so ridiculous

The power grids that Google’s data centres are plugged into have to increase generation to match this new demand – and that includes rising use of coal and gas, and as a consequence, worse climate disasters like deadly heatwaves. Google’s consumption is rising way faster than the grids are being cleaned up with renewables, and that means their emissions number is going up fast, too. It’s the steepest rise on record:

Read Google’s report, and they sort of mumble through this problem:

"While we remain deeply committed to sustainability, reaching our climate moonshot is getting harder. Growing our data center footprint to build out the infrastructure needed to make AI as helpful as possible to everyone requires energy and resources"

"While the path to achieving our climate ambitions will not be linear—given our AI infrastructure buildout is currently accelerating faster than the grid is decarbonizing—we remain focused on scaling abundant and affordable clean power globally and progressing technological innovations that drive down emissions across our operations and the broader industry"

They’re not wrong here. The path to ‘achieving their climate ambitions’ is not linear. It is looking more like an exponential , going in the exact wrong direction:

This all of Google’s emissions, compared to their target. "Raw" is just the unadjusted numbers, and "claimed" shows exclusions from their supply chain and renewable energy procurement claims, which I go into a bit below.

If "AI infrastructure buildout is currently accelerating faster than the grid is decarbonising" then Google shouldn’t be building AI infrastructure. If they are breaching the boundaries of safe operation on a planet that can only take so much, they should stop and consider whether all of this is worth it.

Think about what Google’s AI services have done for you. Does it seem worth it? Are you getting a deadly heatwave’s worth of use, out of PDF summaries and AI overviews?

While Google have clearly toned down the "net benefit to AI" language we criticised in a report earlier this year, they’ve invented some absurd new AI ‘benefit ‘avoided emissions’ claims that don’t hold up to scrutiny. They’ve ramped up their ‘efficiency-washing’ a few notches: a tactic that badly downplays the real, absolute impact of their decisions. They’ve written up substantial clean energy deals, but those deals lack critical information for us to know how meaningful they really are.

Despite this greenwashing bonanza, Google doesn’t even bother to pretend to be on track for its climate goals. Mix the foolish decision-making of FOMO-ridden executives with the most stunningly inefficient software tool big tech has ever created and you end up with a formerly efficient company turned into a blunt Bitcoin-style climate bomb, weirdly still convinced they’re saving the planet.

AI solutionism – toned down but still a problem

In ‘The AI Climate Hoax‘, we (a group of accountability, anti-disinformation and climate groups) told the story of how Google could not stop claiming that "AI" could reduce global emissions by 5 to 10% by 2030 (including in their 2024 sustainability report). That statement didn’t come from a study or an analysis, but from a consulting group’s sloppy guesstimate extrapolated from a random conversation. This was a claim that was a headline statement Google used in policy recommendations for the European Union!

Google’s head of sustainability,...