GOOGLE CARBON EMISSIONS UP 25 PERCENT, AMAZON UP 16 PERCENT. AI IS BURNING THE PLANET AND BOTH COMPANIES KNOW IT Google and Amazon both released their annual sustainability reports this week, and the numbers confirm what critics have said for years: the AI boom is making the tech industry’s already broken climate promises completely impossible to keep. Google’s total carbon emissions are up 25 percent from last year. Amazon’s are up 16 percent. Both companies have pledged to reach net-zero emissions in the coming years. Both are now further from that goal than when they made those pledges. Neither company comes out and blames AI directly, but the evidence is everywhere in the fine print. Their Scope 3 emissions, the category covering pollution from things they buy and build rather than directly operate, have exploded. For Google and Amazon that means data centers, GPU purchases, and the semiconductor manufacturing required to keep feeding the AI machine. Chip factories in Asia run on coal-heavy electrical grids and use chemicals that warm the atmosphere thousands of times more effectively than carbon dioxide. For years, buying renewable energy certificates was enough to offset a tech company’s footprint. AI has made that math impossible. The data centers required to run frontier models at scale demand power that renewables alone cannot reliably supply. Both companies have begun investing in natural gas plants to close the gap. The AI revolution is being built on the back of the planet. The receipts are now public. Keywords: Google carbon emissions AI, Amazon sustainability AI, AI environmental impact, tech industry climate pledges