Big Tech spent years burnishing its green credentials with ambitious net-zero pledges and renewable energy commitments. Now a growing cohort of activist investors wants to know why those same companies are building AI infrastructure that could blow right through those targets.
Shareholders at Amazon, Google, and Meta are filing resolutions demanding greater transparency around the environmental costs of the AI boom. The core issue is straightforward: training and running large AI models requires enormous amounts of electricity and water, and the companies racing hardest into AI are the same ones that promised to clean up their carbon footprints.
The numbers behind the pressure
The scale of resource consumption is staggering. AI currently consumes enough electricity to power 7 million US homes. Projections suggest that figure could swell to cover 22% of US households by 2028.
Water is the other side of the equation. North American data centers consumed nearly 1 trillion liters of water in 2025, roughly equivalent to New York City’s entire annual water usage. Cooling racks of GPUs running around the clock turns out to be a thirsty business.
