Tech companies like to present themselves as some of the most climate-friendly corporations in the world. And in some ways, this is actually true. Amazon, Meta and Google were three of the top four corporate buyers of clean energy purchase agreements in 2023. They’d like you to think this cancels out their own electricity usage.

But, as we show in the first of a series of three videos on AI’s climate footprint, big tech companies are using more electricity than ever thanks to their insatiable demand for data centers to power AI. The AI-driven demand for energy is so high that the companies’ clean energy purchases simply can’t keep up. (See Microsoft’s efforts to re-open the Three Mile Island nuclear plant–with taxpayer backing–in order to fuel its AI data-center energy needs.)

Using data from the corporate sustainability reports for seven major tech companies—Google, Amazon, Meta, Netflix, Microsoft, IBM, and Intel—as well as other sources of corporate disclosures and academic studies, we found astronomical increases for electricity usage in recent years. These companies are using so much electricity, in fact, that it outpaces their world-leading green energy purchases. For example, Google’s electricity consumption has increased 186 percent since 2017. Microsoft’s has increased 186 percent as well. Meta’s has increased 367 percent during the same time period. 

As we show through company green energy PR messaging, tech companies want you to believe paying to build new solar and wind farms cancels all that out. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. The green energy companies purchase is often on different grids than the data centers they use, with different mixes of clean and dirty energy, and with different impacts on how much CO2 is really being avoided. Google, to its credit, discloses this problem in its environmental reports. But despite its massive investments in green energy, a smaller share of Google’s data center electricity is powered by clean energy now than it was in 2020. None of these companies responded to our requests for comment on the energy impact of AI.

It is, of course, great that the big tech companies take their climate responsibility seriously enough to be global leaders in green energy purchases. When it comes to electricity consumption, tech companies often repeat the familiar adage of “The greenest energy is the energy they don’t use.” Unfortunately, they don’t practice what they preach.