Read our 11th annual Environmental Report

Today, we’re releasing our 11th Environmental Report, which provides a holistic view of our 2025 sustainability performance. This year’s most impressive highlights: In 2025 alone, we signed agreements for over 12 GW of net-new clean energy 1 — roughly enough to power a country the size of Greece for a year, once operational. 2 At the same time, we successfully reduced our operational emissions by 2% despite the significant ongoing growth in our electricity demand. 3

Our report navigates the tension between hyper-growth and environmental stewardship, and proves our enduring commitment to a more sustainable future. At Google, we’re deeply committed to responsibly managing the environmental footprint of our operations and unlocking the power of AI for the planet. While the path to achieving our climate ambitions will not be linear — given our AI infrastructure buildout is currently accelerating faster than the grid is decarbonizing — we remain focused on scaling abundant and affordable clean power globally and progressing technological innovations that drive down emissions across our operations and the broader industry.

Delivering record clean energy while investing in future energy breakthroughs

The AI revolution has made the last five years especially transformative, and we’re proud of the progress we’ve achieved toward balancing growth, innovation and environmental ambition.

Google is one of the largest corporate purchasers of clean energy in the world. From 2010 to 2025, we signed more than 240 agreements to purchase nearly 35 GW of net-new clean energy. 4 Through these cumulative agreements, we’re expanding the global power supply with enough new capacity to power over 28 million U.S. homes, 5 or roughly every household in New York, Texas and Pennsylvania combined. 6 When paired with our industry-leading data center infrastructure — which uses 83% less overhead energy than the industry average 7 — we’re working to ensure every megawatt is used as efficiently as possible.

Notably, despite navigating our largest load growth in history — a 37% annual increase in electricity demand — we successfully reduced our operational emissions by 2% year-over-year while matching 100% of our electricity consumption with renewable energy purchases for the ninth consecutive year. 8 These milestones prove it's possible to decouple our rapid operational growth from our carbon footprint.

To achieve this, we invest in reliable, clean capacity on the local grids that support our data centers. We are also helping to catalyze advanced energy sources—such as nuclear and enhanced geothermal —while making long-term investments in breakthrough technologies like fusion. We’re committed to being a good neighbor, which begins with ensuring our expansion doesn’t burden local communities or other utility customers. We intentionally structure our energy deals to cover 100% of the costs of the power we use. Our responsible growth strategy also focuses on expanding access to affordable, reliable, and clean energy for everyone in the communities where we operate.

Furthermore, advances in machine hardware efficiencies, software and compute efficiencies, and clean energy procurement collectively avoided over 58 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) in 2025 alone. 9 Without these interventions, we estimate that our ambition-based 10 carbon footprint in 2025 would’ve been five times larger. The magnitude of our avoided emissions proves our decarbonization tools are working, even though we’re growing at hyperscale.

Our pursuit of efficiency extends beyond energy to the rest of our operations and value chain. In 2025, our water stewardship projects replenished approximately 7.7 billion gallons of water 11 — roughly 78% of our 2025 freshwater consumption, marking progress toward our ambition to replenish more water than we consume by 2030. 12

Advancing solutions for the planet through AI products and research

Our impact goes beyond just operating Google more sustainably. It’s also about using our technology to build a better future for everyone. Our data centers are powering AI products used by billions of people around the world to drive progress across science, health, the economy and more.

We see — and are actively seizing — a huge opportunity for AI to help drive progress on environmental issues specifically. In 2025, nine of our solutions enabled individuals, cities, and partners to collectively reduce an estimated 41 million tCO2e. 13 That’s roughly three times Google’s own emissions. 14 For example, we’re helping others mitigate emissions through efficiencies in high-impact sectors like energy and transportation. Examples include: Google Earth, which optimizes layouts for solar and wind developers to accelerate project siting; Nest thermostats, which use machine learning to automate home energy savings; and fuel-efficient routing in Google Maps, which analyzes factors like traffic and terrain to suggest lower-emission routes for drivers.

We’re also supporting communities in staying safe during extreme events and natural disasters. Building on our longstanding efforts to provide timely information to help protect people in harm's way, we've advanced AI breakthroughs that enable forecasting and early detection of natural disasters such as wildfires, floods, earthquakes and extreme weather.

And we’re working to protect the planet through powerful AI tools—like Perch, a bioacoustic embedding model for analyzing massive bioacoustic datasets, or SpeciesNet, an Earth AI model that can recognize over 2,000 animal species in images from motion-triggered wildlife cameras with over 94% accuracy—making nature protection more accessible, affordable, and effective.

Ultimately, as we develop new AI solutions to meet global challenges, our task is to maximize the immense good AI can do for the planet while minimizing its resource intensity.

Progressing toward our climate and energy moonshots requires significant innovation

At the beginning of the decade, we set net-zero and 24/7 carbon-free energy moonshots designed to push the frontiers of what’s possible in energy systems and data center operations. From the start, we were clear that these moonshots were intentionally aspirational and that success would require significant innovation in technology and policy. Over the past few years, the rapid rise of AI has reshaped global infrastructure and placed new demands on the grid. Our moonshots pushed us to meet this moment, and the scale of our impact has grown accordingly. In 2025, we contracted for eight times more clean energy than we did in 2019, and the emissions we successfully avoided in 2025 were seven times larger than our 2019 ambition-based carbon footprint, our moonshot baseline.

While we remain deeply committed to sustainability, reaching our climate moonshots is getting harder. It takes energy and resources to support the growing demand for AI that powers businesses and the tools we use every day. Like everyone in our industry, we experienced a surge in electricity demand last year. Our AI infrastructure buildout is accelerating faster than the grid is decarbonizing, and long waits to connect to the grid, fragmented markets, supply chain delays, and regulatory bottlenecks continue to slow down new carbon-free energy from coming online. We’re working within energy systems that simply aren't clean enough or flexible enough yet.

Although we were successful in decreasing our operational emissions, our supply chain emissions grew by 25% year-over-year. This increase reflects not only the scale of new AI infrastructure, but also an Asia-Pacific supply chain operating on grids that remain undersupplied with carbon-free energy. This is in part due to land constraints, high construction costs, and policy and regulatory hurdles.

Looking ahead

We continue to evolve our approach in tandem with the technology we build, regularly assessing our strategy as we move forward with steady execution, balancing our bold climate ambition with real-world impact. We’ll continue to prioritize AI stack efficiencies, clean energy, and innovation to ensure our efforts make use of the transformative potential of AI to enhance lives globally.

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