Big Tech Emissions Surge to a Third of France's
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- Microsoft, Amazon and Google saw their combined emissions climb to 119m metric tonnes of CO₂ equivalent in the financial year ending March 2026, roughly a third of France's total and up nearly a fifth from about 101m tonnes the previous year.
- Microsoft posted the steepest individual rise, a 25% jump to 20m tonnes, which it blamed "primarily" on datacentre infrastructure expansion; its emissions had previously flatlined at around 16m tonnes in 2023 and 2024.
- Google reported an 18% increase but countered that its AI systems had helped cut emissions elsewhere by 41m tonnes of CO₂ last year; Amazon logged a 16% rise (20% in supply chain) while still describing its report as "making progress" toward its 2040 net-zero target.
- Big tech is on track to spend $765bn (£570bn) this year, largely on AI datacentres, with property consultancy JLL projecting roughly 1,200 new datacentres globally by 2030.
- The Uptime Institute estimated that big datacentre projects already announced would consume 1.3% of global electricity — nearly double current datacentre demand, with most new power demand coming from US projects.
- Cecilia Rikap of University College London called cloud sustainability claims "a marketing strategy," warning that firms moving data and AI training to hyperscaler clouds are effectively outsourcing their own carbon footprint.
Why it matters: All three companies still publicly target net zero — Microsoft and Google by 2030, Amazon by 2040 — yet their own sustainability reports show emissions climbing double digits in a single year, putting the AI infrastructure buildout on a direct collision course with those pledges and shifting real climate costs onto other companies via cloud outsourcing.
