AI’ s role in Big Tech’ s ambitious net zero commitments Bloomberg reported in 2024 that Big Tech’ s climate goals are at risk thanks to AI’ s massive energy demands. But companies like Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, Meta and Amazon – commonly known as the Big Five – have all pledged to achieve net zero emissions, some as early as 2030: well ahead of the 2050 deadline set by most international frameworks.
For example, Google aims to achieve net zero emissions across its operations and value chain by 2030, using AI to help achieve this goal. However, Google’ s growing AI activities have also contributed to an increase in emissions, making it a challenging task to reach net zero.
“ AI represents a huge opportunity for sustainability,” Google’ s CSO Kate Brandt says.“ For example, our AI-powered efficiency recommendation system for data centres led to a 40 % reduction in the energy we use for cooling. There’ s a huge opportunity for us to reduce energy consumption across our own data centre fleet and also to make [ the technology ] more widely available [ for others to use ].”
Since saying that in 2020, Google has curated its operations to make its facilities around 1.8 times as energy efficient as“ the typical enterprise data centre”.
Google’ s 2024 Environmental Report, however, did uncover a 13 % rise in greenhouse gas emissions in the 12 months prior largely due to energy consumption from AI and data centres.
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