– Nscale
What a difference six years made.
Back in 2020, Big Tech was swept up in a tidal wave of lofty climate pledges. Amazon would have net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030, and Google will operate on carbon-free energy “24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year - all by 2030.”
Two years later, the AI boom hit, and data center developers and cloud companies alike began fighting tooth and nail for just about every bit of resource our planet had to give.
Now in 2026, with the AI data center build-out in full swing and a US government more concerned with preserving the fossil fuel industry than protecting the planet, there is some doubt about whether these climate goals will be achieved.
