AI's arrival complicates Big Tech climate goals, and some worry it's locking in more fossil fuels

Six years ago, Google was confident that by 2030 it would power all operations with electricity generated from clean sources, including wind and solar power, and remove as much pollution as it produced. Today it calls those goals a “moonshot.” Microsoft says it's still aiming to remove more carbon than it creates by 2030 but now describes the effort as “a marathon, not a sprint.”

The race to deploy artificial intelligence is complicating tech companies' commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, most of which come from the burning of gas, oil and coal and drive climate change. They say they must be flexible as they rush to build sprawling data centers that can consume more power than entire cities.

“Even if they haven’t officially revised their goals, they are starting to acknowledge that, ‘Yeah, we’re maybe not on track,’” said Patrick Huang, a senior analyst at Wood Mackenzie.

Now, Huang said, the companies must use whatever kinds of power they can to stay competitive — and increasingly that is natural gas, which is mostly methane, a planet-warming greenhouse gas.

Tech companies bought record amounts of clean energy in 2024 and 2025, according to the Clean Energy Buyers Association. But their total emissions are going up.

Over roughly the first five years of their climate commitments, for example, Google's emissions jumped nearly 50%. Amazon's rose by 33%, Microsoft's more than 23% and Meta's more than 60%.

Data centers used about 4.6% of total U.S. electricity in 2024, a share that could nearly triple by 2028, according to government estimates. Some analysts predict nationwide electricity use to rise as much as 20% in the next decade, with data centers a big reason.

Meanwhile, a backlog of proposed projects awaiting permission to connect to power grids and efforts by the Trump administration to sideline renewable energy may affect tech companies’ climate goals — and prolong reliance on fossil fuels, experts said.

“Each of these alone could be real challenges,” said Julie McNamara, associate policy director at Union of Concerned Scientists’ Climate & Energy program. “Together, it’s just creating a real near-term crunch on the system.”

Tech companies say they’ve made significant progress on emissions through energy-efficiency measures, buying renewable energy credits and power from sources that don't emit greenhouse gases and requiring suppliers to reduce their own emissions.

Yet natural gas in 2024 accounted for more than 40% of electricity powering U.S. data centers, while coal supplied 30% globally, the International Energy Agency said. And the trend doesn't appear to be slowing. Utilities are planning natural gas plants around the country to help supply data centers, while some tech companies plan on-site gas plants built only to feed a data center.

“Companies are scrambling to try to get as much power as they can as quickly as possible,” said Lori Bird, director of the U.S. Energy Program at the World Resources Institute. “It’s a mad rush and a lot of competition for resources."

Microsoft President Brad Smith told The Associated Press that he is “confident in our ability” to meet the company's 2030 goal to remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it emits by investing in new sources of carbon-free energy, including nuclear, solar and hydropower.

In Wisconsin, for example, two new natural gas plants to help power a Microsoft data center will be offset by investment in solar elsewhere in the state. Similarly, three natural gas plants will provide electricity to a massive Meta data center in rural Louisiana, while the company invests in solar elsewhere.

Google says it’s investing in wind, hydropower, battery storage and advanced nuclear, though it also relies on natural gas. The company plans to buy electricity from a natural gas plant to be built at the Archer Daniels Midland corn processing plant in Decatur, Illinois, where carbon dioxide emissions would be captured and stored underground.

To help meet clean energy goals, tech companies count on such power purchase agreements and buying renewable energy certificates, a tradeable commodity that supports new and existing sources. But that could get more difficult under proposed changes to how greenhouse gases are reported, which would require that sources are in the same region as a company's data center and match hours of operation — for example, solar credits could only be applied to daytime operating hours.

Although some new gas plants will replace dirtier coal plants, it takes about 30 years to recover the investment. That means delaying the overall transition to clean and renewable energy at a time when the United Nations Environment Programme warns that high-emitting countries are unlikely to meet their own targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. AI is blamed in part for a 2.4% uptick in U.S. fossil fuel emissions last year, according to a study by the Rhodium Group, an independent research firm.

And though other sectors of the economy also are electrifying, "it is only because of these data centers that these gas plants are being built,” McNamara said. “There are no two ways about it.”

Getting enough electricity was challenging even before President Donald Trump took office last year and took aim at renewable energy.

He's canceled grants and permits for solar and wind projects and tax breaks for renewable energy, which advocates say can be built less expensively and more quickly than natural gas or nuclear plants, while ordering that several coal-fired power plants slated for retirement keep running.

Many companies set goals expecting federal tax credits would support wind and solar deployment, said Rich Powell, chief executive officer of the Clean Energy Buyers Association. But those were stripped away by the Republican-controlled Congress and Trump.

Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax,” has argued that green energy is unreliable and expensive and could harm national energy independence.

Powell said his association has “been very, very clear with this Congress and this administration that all technology should be on a level playing field and that we’re putting both energy affordability and energy reliability at risk if we don’t do that.”

Josh Parker, sustainability chief for chipmaker Nvidia, said AI eventually will reduce electricity use because it's more efficient than traditional computing. He said curtailing energy development could cause the U.S. to fall behind on AI.

“Our perspective is that we need an all-of-the-above approach to energy," he said.

Tech companies would have been hard-pressed in 2020, when many set goals, to project current energy needs because much of the technology and equipment used to train machine-learning models — which use most data-center electricity — were just being introduced, said Jay Dietrich, who researches AI sustainability for the Uptime Institute and formerly led emissions goal-setting at IBM.

By 2023, he said, tech companies “had a pretty good idea things were going to get a lot more exciting ... and that the numbers were going to grow quickly.”

He expects many will extend the timeline for emissions goals, based on a 2025 Uptime Institute survey that saw a 12% drop in the number of operators saying they'd meet a market-based 2030 carbon-neutral goal. However, even with increasing emissions, the largest companies should be able to afford enough renewable energy and offsets to meet carbon-neutral goals.

McNamara said the surge in electricity demand from data centers turned a challenge into “an outright crisis.”

“Tech companies are allowing implicitly or explicitly an enormous increase in fossil fuel dependence under their watch and because of their actions," she said.

Associated Press writer Matt O'Brien contributed to this report.

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FILE - A Microsoft sign and logo are displayed at the company's headquarters April 4, 2025, in Redmond, Wash. (AP Photo/Jason Redmond, File)

FILE - Meta's Stanton Springs Data Center is visible Jan. 13, 2026, in Newton County, Ga. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart, File)

FILE - A Meta logo is shown on a video screen at LlamaCon 2025, an AI developer conference, in Menlo Park, Calif., April 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)

FILE - A woman walks by a giant screen with a logo at an event at the Paris Google Lab on the sidelines of the AI Action Summit in Paris, Feb. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, File)

FILE - The Douglas County Google Data Center complex is visible, March 6, 2026, in Lithia Springs, Ga. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart, File)

FILE - An Amazon logo is visible at an event in New York, Sept. 30, 2025. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)

FILE - A data center owned by Amazon Web Services, front right, is under construction next to the Susquehanna nuclear power plant in Berwick, Pa., Jan. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey, File)

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Israel launched a wave of strikes on Iran early Friday ahead of a planned U.N. Security Council meeting to discuss attacks on Iranian civilian infrastructure, while Iran and the United States appeared at a diplomatic impasse, setting the stage for potential escalation as the first month of the Middle East war neared its end.

Israel’s attack Friday on targets “in the heart of Tehran” targeted sites used by Iran to produce ballistic missiles and other weapons, the Israeli military said. It also hit missile launchers and storage sites in western Iran.

Smoke also rose over Beirut, although Israel did not immediately report hitting the Lebanese capital, while air raid sirens sounded in Israel as the military said it was working to intercept Iranian missiles. Iran kept firing missiles and drones at its Gulf Arab neighbors, with sirens warning of attacks in Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Kuwait said its Shuwaikh Port in Kuwait City had sustained “material damage” in attack but that nobody was hurt.

The U.S. has been pushing Iran to start talks on a 15-point proposal for a ceasefire, but at the same time has ordered thousands more troops to the region, possibly in preparation for a military attempt to wrest the Strait of Hormuz from Iran’s tight grip.

After Wall Street's worst day since the war began, Asian shares mostly fell Friday over growing doubts about the chances of de-escalation. Oil prices rose again, the Brent crude, the international standard, at $107 a barrel in morning trading, up more than 45% since Israel and the U.S. attacked Iran on Feb. 28 to start the war.

Iran's stranglehold on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, has caused growing concerns of a global energy crisis, and appears part of a strategy to get the U.S. to back down by roiling the world economy. A Gulf Arab bloc said Thursday that Iran is now exacting tolls from ships to ensure their safe passage through the waterway.

Trump envoy Steve Witkoff said Washington has delivered a 15-point “action list" to Iran for a possible ceasefire, using Pakistan as an intermediary. The list includes restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program and re-opening the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran has rejected the U.S. offer and put forth its own five-point proposal, which includes reparations and recognition of its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz.

As the diplomatic efforts went on, a group of U.S. ships drew closer to the region with some 2,500 Marines. Also, at least 1,000 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne — trained to land in hostile territory to secure key territory and airfields — have been ordered to the region.

As American and Israeli attacks on Iran continued, the U.N. Security Council scheduled closed consultation on Iran for Friday in New York, according to two U.N. diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because the meeting is not public.

They added that Russia had asked for the meeting on U.S.-Israeli attacks on civilian infrastructure in the country, that the United States, which holds the Security Council presidency, had scheduled it.

Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, said the humanitarian organization's workers in Iran have reported to him that “countless homes, hospitals and schools have been damaged or destroyed,” and that nearly every neighborhood in Tehran has sustained damage.

“Civilians are paying the highest price for this war — it must end” he said in a statement.

“If this war continues, we risk a far wider humanitarian disaster,” he added. “Millions could be forced to flee across borders, placing immense pressure on an already overstretched region.”

Since the war began, more than 1,900 people have been killed in Iran, according to the Health Ministry.

Eighteen people have died in Israel, while at least three Israeli soldiers have also been killed in Lebanon. At least 13 American troops have been killed. Four people in the occupied West Bank and 20 in Gulf Arab states have also died.

Authorities said more than 1,100 people have died in Lebanon. In Iraq, where Iranian-supported militia groups have entered the conflict, 80 members of the security forces have been killed.

Rising reported from Bangkok. Associated Press writers Giovanna Dell'Orto in Miami and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.

A shell that appears to be white phosphorus from Israeli artillery explodes over a road leading to Chamaa village, as it is seen from Tyre city, south Lebanon, Friday, March 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Residents look on as first responders inspect the rubble and search for victims at a residential building hit in an earlier U.S.-Israeli strike in Tehran, Friday, March 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

Some rising from an Israeli airstrike that hit Qlaileh village, is seen from Tyre city, south Lebanon, Friday, March 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

A first responder inspects the damaged structure of a residential building hit in an earlier U.S.-Israeli strike in Tehran, Friday, March 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

A woman holds a portrait of Iran's late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during a protest outside Iran's embassy, where dozens of people gathered waving Hezbollah and Iranian flags in solidarity with the Islamic Republic, in Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, March 26, 2026. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

A girl holds a toy gun during a protest outside Iran's embassy, where dozens of people gathered waving Hezbollah and Iranian flags in solidarity with the Islamic Republic, in Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, March 26, 2026. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

A woman holds a picture of the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei during a pro-government gathering in a square in western Tehran, Iran, Wednesday, March 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

Pro-government supporters chant slogans and wave Iranian flags during a rally, in a square in western Tehran, Iran, Wednesday, March 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

Relatives grieve an Iraqi soldier killed in a strike Wednesday on a military clinic in western Iraq's Anbar province, during a mass procession inside the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf, Iraq, Thursday, March 26, 2026. (AP Photo/Anmar Khalil)