Microsoft, Amazon and Google said their collective carbon emissions rose by nearly a fifth in the financial year ending March 2026, driven largely by datacentre construction and the wider build-out of artificial intelligence infrastructure. The three companies emitted 119m mTCO₂e, or about a third of France’s emissions. The year before, they emitted roughly 101m mTCO₂e, about equivalent to the 2024 emissions of Czechia. The numbers are tidy enough for a sustainability report. The reality is not.
The Carbon Cost of the Cloud
Microsoft said in a report released on Thursday that its carbon emissions increased by 25% over the past year to 20m mTCO₂e, driven primarily by the expansion of its datacentre infrastructure. Google said its emissions rose 18% over the past year, driven by increases in supply chain activities that supported the rapid expansion of its business. Amazon reported a 16% increase in emissions overall and a 20% increase in supply chain emissions, which included datacentre building and construction. These are not side effects. They are the material footprint of a business model that keeps expanding while calling itself efficient.
All three companies still say they aim to achieve net zero emissions. Google and Microsoft say they want to reach that goal by 2030, while Amazon says 2040. The promise sits there, neat and distant, while the emissions keep climbing now. Cecilia Rikap, an economics professor at University College London, said: “Claims by Microsoft, Amazon and Google about their clouds being ecologically friendly and sustainable are a marketing strategy. Governments should remember these expanding carbon footprints when the very same companies offer addressing the ecological crisis with AI solutions.
“And, as migration to their clouds expands, and companies store data and train and use AI models and all sorts of digital technologies, these other companies are outsourcing their own digital/AI carbon footprint to cloud giants. Basically, shifting to the cloud helps other corporations obscure their environmental footprint.”
That’s the trick. The cloud doesn’t make the footprint disappear. It just moves the accounting away from the companies that want the benefits and toward the giants that can absorb the blame.
The Expansion Machine
Shaolei Ren, a professor of electrical engineering at University of California, Riverside, said the increases in total carbon emissions were strongly correlated with the companies’ AI investment. He said Microsoft’s sustainability report also suggested there were fewer carbon credits available on global markets to offset its emissions. “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 … Everyone is talking about the lack of physical goods and infrastructure like power, but there may also be a lack of virtual goods – carbon credits,” he said.
That’s the market logic in miniature. First the companies burn more. Then they hunt for offsets. Then they discover the carbon market may not have enough paper cover for the scale of the damage. The language stays managerial. The emissions don’t.
The companies’ annual sustainability reports were released over the past weeks. Microsoft’s report said its emissions increase was driven primarily by datacentre infrastructure expansion. Google said its rise was driven by supply chain activities tied to rapid business growth. Amazon said its supply chain emissions included datacentre building and construction. The reports read like a confession written in corporate dialect.
The bulk of the emissions come from a global push to build infrastructure for artificial intelligence. The world’s biggest tech companies are on track to spend $765bn (£570bn) this year, mostly on building AI datacentres in locations from Norway to North Tyneside. JLL, a US property consultancy, expects about 1,200 datacentres to be built globally between now and 2030, with demand overwhelmingly driven by AI. This is not a small adjustment to the digital economy. It’s a vast construction programme, financed by some of the richest firms on earth, with the atmosphere left to absorb the bill.
Power, Demand, and the Public Cost
The Uptime Institute, which rates and inspects datacentres, estimates that big datacentre projects announced last year would consume 1.3% of the world’s electricity usage, or a near-doubling of current datacentre demand. The majority of that new power demand will come from US projects, it said. So while the companies talk about sustainability and net zero targets, the build-out keeps pulling more electricity, more construction, more supply-chain emissions, and more pressure onto public systems that ordinary people already depend on.
The scale matters because the companies involved are not fringe players. Microsoft, Amazon and Google are central to the digital infrastructure that governments, firms and institutions increasingly rely on. Their emissions rose nearly a fifth in one year while they continued to present themselves as part of the solution. The figures in their own reports say otherwise. The cloud is not weightless. The AI boom is not clean. And the people selling it as progress are the same ones cashing in on the expansion.