Google wants to organize the world’s information. Turns out, that goal now comes with a carbon footprint roughly the size of a small nation’s.
The company’s 2025 Environmental Report reveals that total greenhouse gas emissions reached approximately 11.5 million tons of CO2-equivalent in fiscal year 2024. That’s a 51% increase from Google’s 2019 baseline, driven overwhelmingly by the infrastructure required to power AI models like Gemini.
Data center electricity consumption alone climbed 27% year-over-year, a spike the company attributes primarily to AI workloads and growth across its supply chain operations. For context, the International Energy Agency projects that global data center electricity usage could double to around 945 TWh by 2030.
The efficiency paradox
The company actually achieved a 12% reduction in data center energy emissions in 2024, thanks to clean energy investments and more efficient hardware. But total emissions still ballooned because demand for AI compute is growing faster than efficiency gains can offset.
