https://energybadboys.substack.com/p/google-and-microsoft-set-new-emissions
By ISAAC ORR AND MITCH ROLLING
Excerpt:
“It’s not who emits that counts, but who counts the emissions,” -Joseph Stalin, European Union Minister for Climate Change and the Environment, 2026.
Big Tech companies continue to hit new high scores for their greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) despite the Very Serious pledges they made in 2020 to be carbon-neutral by 2030. According to Microsoft’s latest sustainability report, the company’s GHGs exceeded 21 million metric tons in fiscal year 2025, up 27 percent from the year before.
It’s the same story for Google. The company’s latest environmental report noted that emissions rose 18 percent compared to the prior year, reaching 18.8 million metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions.
For those keeping score, that means Microsoft and Google now emit more greenhouse gases than entire states, and the real emissions numbers are even higher than the headline numbers reported by the Tech Giants in the mainstream press.
Big Tech’s soaring emissions mostly stem from building AI data centers and powering them with skyrocketing quantities of natural-gas-fired electricity. Natural gas is the preferred fuel because data centers need constant power, 24-7, 365 days a year, that unreliable wind and solar resources simply cannot provide.
Google and Microsoft’s emissions are rising so quickly that they are surpassing entire states on the greenhouse gas scoreboard.
The graph below shows emissions for the two companies, compared with carbon dioxide emissions data for coal, oil, and natural gas in each state from 2024, obtained from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
In 2010, Google would have been the smallest-emitting state in the nation, and Microsoft would have been the 49th-largest emitter, just ahead of Vermont. The trend was essentially flat from 2010 to 2015, but by 2025, both Google and Microsoft had leapfrogged Idaho and Montana to become tied for the 42nd-largest emitter in the Union.
