https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-surge/2026/10/14/ai-killed-the-climate-star-01117484
By ZACK COLMAN
The tech industry is the new kingmaker of the energy world — and it’s about to face some major climate tests.
Take Google. Six years ago, the company pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2030. Then came the artificial intelligence boom.
The tech giant saw its carbon emissions rise 18% in 2025 compared to 2024 as it increasingly uses natural gas to power its data centers.
Google isn’t changing its goal, Marsden Hanna, the company’s head of energy and sustainability policy, told me on the POLITICO Energy podcast. But he acknowledged the odds of achieving that “moonshot” have gotten slimmer.
“We’re really focused on doing as much as we can to get there,” he said. “The AI load growth trajectory has altered the focus and made this more difficult, but it’s something we continue to focus on.”
Google and others, like Amazon and Meta, have announced several splashy deals to hook data centers to nuclear and geothermal power. But the AI boom is also juicing demand for natural gas, eviscerating the pledges tech companies once made to sharply reduce planet-warming emissions. Microsoft’s emissions surged 25% and Amazon’s jumped 16% in 2025 relative to previous year.
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The EU next August will begin requiring data centers to disclose their water use, clean power uptake and energy efficiency. In the U.S., Democrats will likely make Big Tech and its energy use part of their oversight agenda if they win any chamber of Congress in the midterm elections next month.
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The public backlash against data centers has been fierce. Local regulations and opposition have stalled or canceled at least 157 U.S. data center projects, my colleague Ben Storrow reported Tuesday.
