Google's electricity demand rose 37% in 2025, the largest load growth in the company's history, according to its 2026 Environmental Report released on June 30, 2026. Despite that growth, Google said its operational emissions, covering Scope 1 and market-based Scope 2, fell 2% year on year. Supply chain emissions rose 25%.
The company said it signed agreements in 2025 for more than 12 GW of net-new clean energy and matched 100% of its electricity consumption with renewable energy purchases on an annual basis for the ninth consecutive year.
Clean energy procurement
Google said it is one of the largest corporate buyers of clean energy. From 2010 to 2025, it signed more than 240 agreements to purchase nearly 35 GW of net-new clean energy. The company said its 2025 contracting was eight times larger than in 2019.
Google said it structures energy deals to cover 100% of the costs of the power it uses, so that its expansion does not burden other utility customers. It is also investing in advanced energy sources such as nuclear and enhanced geothermal, and in longer-term technologies including fusion.
Supply chain emissions
The 25% rise in supply chain emissions reflects the scale of new AI infrastructure, including servers, chips and construction, and an Asia-Pacific supply chain that operates on grids with limited carbon-free power, according to Chief Sustainability Officer Kate Brandt. She cited land constraints, high construction costs and regulatory hurdles as reasons clean power supply has lagged in those markets.
"Our AI infrastructure buildout is accelerating faster than the grid is decarbonizing," Brandt wrote, adding that grid connection delays, fragmented markets, supply chain delays and regulatory bottlenecks slow new carbon-free energy. She said reaching the company's climate goals "is getting harder."
Efficiency and avoided emissions
Google said its data centers use 83% less overhead energy than the industry average, based on a comparison of its power usage effectiveness with the 1.54 global average reported in the Uptime Institute's 2025 survey. The company's average PUE was 1.09.
Google estimated that hardware efficiency, software and compute efficiency and clean energy procurement together avoided more than 58 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent in 2025. Without those measures, it said, its ambition-based carbon footprint would have been five times larger. The ambition-based footprint is a metric Google uses to track its climate goals, which excludes some Scope 3 categories and includes certain market instruments beyond what the Greenhouse Gas Protocol currently recognizes.
Water
Google's water stewardship projects replenished about 7.7 billion gallons in 2025, roughly 78% of its freshwater consumption, according to the report. The company aims to replenish 120% of the freshwater it consumes across offices and data centers by 2030. Water use for data center cooling has become a local issue in several regions, particularly in the arid West and in parts of Europe and Latin America.
Context: hyperscaler emissions
Google's report follows several years in which large technology companies have reported rising emissions linked to data center growth. In 2025, Google reported that its total emissions had risen substantially since 2019, and Microsoft and Amazon reported similar trends. The companies have net zero or carbon negative targets for 2030 or 2040 and have become the largest corporate buyers of clean power.
The distinction between operational and supply chain emissions is central to understanding the numbers. Operational emissions depend heavily on electricity procurement and on how market-based accounting treats power purchase agreements and certificates. Supply chain emissions, which include the manufacturing of servers and chips and the construction of buildings, are harder for companies to control and are growing with the scale of investment.
Energy market implications
Google's 37% load growth illustrates the scale of electricity demand from AI infrastructure. The IEA estimated in April 2026 that global data center electricity consumption grew 17% in 2025. Google's growth was more than twice that rate. Utilities serving the regions where Google operates data centers have been adding generation and transmission to meet that demand.
The company's emphasis on paying the full cost of its power reflects growing political attention to whether data centers raise electricity bills for other customers. Several states and grid operators have adopted or proposed large-load tariffs that require data centers to commit to minimum payments or to fund the infrastructure they need.
AI as an emissions tool
Google also reported on emissions reductions it says its products enable for others. It estimated that nine of its solutions, including fuel-efficient routing in Google Maps, Nest thermostats and tools that help solar and wind developers site projects, enabled reductions of about 41 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent in 2025, which it described as roughly three times its own ambition-based emissions. Such enabled-emissions estimates rely on assumptions about what would have happened otherwise and are not part of standard greenhouse gas inventories, so they are reported separately from the company's footprint.
Accounting debates
How companies account for electricity emissions is under review. The Greenhouse Gas Protocol, which sets the most widely used corporate accounting standards, has been consulting on changes to Scope 2 rules that could require hourly and geographically closer matching of clean power purchases with consumption. If adopted, such changes would make annual renewable matching claims harder to sustain for companies whose data centers run around the clock on grids that still rely on fossil fuels at night. Google has supported hourly matching and has published hourly carbon-free energy percentages for its data center regions in past reports.
24/7 carbon-free energy
Google has a goal of running on 24/7 carbon-free energy on every grid where it operates by 2030, meaning matching consumption with clean supply every hour rather than on an annual basis. That goal is more demanding than annual matching because it requires clean power at night and during periods of low wind and sun. Google described its 2030 goals as "intentionally aspirational" moonshots and acknowledged that reaching them is becoming harder.
What to watch
Key items include Microsoft's and Amazon's sustainability reports later in the summer, the progress of Google's nuclear and geothermal agreements, the evolution of large-load tariffs and whether accounting rules for Scope 2 emissions under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol revision change how companies report their electricity emissions.