An Updated Look at the Environmental Impact of A.I. Data Centres ⇥ wsj.com
Satya Nadella at Microsoft’s Build conference this year:
Perhaps the most important design criteria for us is: ‘how do we earn the permission from the communities in which we are building these data centres?’
That’s where these principles ground us and focus us. How do we ensure that the D.C.s do not increase the electricity prices? Making sure that we are replenishing all our water use. Creating jobs in the local communities for the local residents. Adding to the tax base. […]
Kate Brandt, chief sustainability officer at Google:
While we remain deeply committed to sustainability, reaching our climate moonshots is getting harder. It takes energy and resources to support the growing demand for AI that powers businesses and the tools we use every day. Like everyone in our industry, we experienced a surge in electricity demand last year. Our AI infrastructure buildout is accelerating faster than the grid is decarbonizing, and long waits to connect to the grid, fragmented markets, supply chain delays, and regulatory bottlenecks continue to slow down new carbon-free energy from coming online. We’re working within energy systems that simply aren’t clean enough or flexible enough yet.
Christopher Mims, Wall Street Journal:
Microsoft, Google and Amazon are among the tech companies spending an estimated $1 trillion on AI infrastructure this year and last. In some regions, they are using far more water than they report, depending on how data centers are powered. And their water consumption is projected to grow rapidly in coming years.
These companies produce annual sustainability reports that include water use at their data centers. But among this group of titans, only Meta tallies water used at the power stations that feed them electricity, in addition to the water used on-site.
Google’s power consumption rose by 7 TWh between 2023 and 2024. That was bad. But it rose by a whopping 12 TWh between 2024 and 2025, almost double last year’s increase. Google’s power consumption isn’t just growing — the rate at which it is growing is growing. We have a word for this: exponential growth.
Every time I look at this chart I have to go and double check every single Google number, because it just looks so ridiculous.
Google’s power consumption is now greater than the amount of electricity generated by New Zealand.
In their environmental reports (all PDF links), Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft all mention carbon capture or direct air capture as one strategy for minimizing the impact of their emissions. Reporters for Heated and ProPublica jointly published a look at carbon capture technologies. They found that carbon capture remains a basically theoretical technology despite decades of promotion. Meanwhile, solar energy installations have dramatically outpaced even the most optimistic projections.