Google's 2025 Environmental Report, released in late June, covers calendar year 2024 and gives one of the most detailed public pictures of how AI-driven data center growth shows up in a hyperscaler's energy, emissions and water figures.
The company's data centers consumed 30.8 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, about 95.8% of Google's total electricity use, and 27% more than in 2023. Over the same period, emissions associated with data center energy use fell 12%, to about 3.1 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent, according to the report and coverage by Trellis. The decline reflects Google's growing portfolio of carbon-free electricity contracts and efficiency gains in its data centers.
The overall footprint
Google's total emissions under the boundary used for its 2030 net-zero goal rose 11% in 2024 to 11.5 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent, a cumulative increase of 51% since its 2019 baseline year. A wider boundary that includes some Alphabet operations excluded from the goal gave 15.2 million metric tons.
The largest driver of the increase was Scope 3 emissions from capital goods and sold products, which rose 38% to 6.3 million metric tons, more than half of Google's Scope 3 total. Trellis reported that this category relates primarily to construction of new data centers: the steel, concrete, servers and other equipment embedded in new capacity.
Google's emissions strategy, which the company says was validated by the Science Based Targets initiative in February 2025, calls for a 50% cut in market-based Scope 1 and 2 emissions and in Scope 3 emissions, with residual emissions to be neutralized through carbon removal.
Clean power contracts
Google signed contracts in 2024 to add about 8 gigawatts of geothermal, nuclear, solar and wind capacity to grids, more than in any previous year. According to Trellis's account of the report, that is about four times the company's incremental load growth between 2023 and 2024. From 2010 to 2024, Google contracted for more than 22 GW of clean power.
The company measures progress against a goal of running on carbon-free energy every hour of every day on every grid where it operates by 2030. Its latest figure, on that hourly matching basis, is 66%. Hourly matching is stricter than the annual matching used by most corporate buyers, because it requires clean supply to be available in the same hour and on the same grid as consumption.
Grids in the Asia-Pacific region remain the biggest obstacle, according to Google's chief sustainability officer. Google is supporting a waste-wood power plant with pilot carbon capture in Singapore and developing a 1 GW solar portfolio in Taiwan, home to many of the semiconductor plants in its supply chain.
Efficiency
Google says its data centers deliver about six times more computing power per unit of electricity than five years ago, a gain it attributes to cooling changes, custom AI chips and software improvements. Its power usage effectiveness, the ratio of total facility energy to IT equipment energy, remains among the lowest reported in the industry.
Efficiency gains reduce the energy needed per unit of computation, but they have not prevented total electricity use from rising rapidly, because demand for computation, particularly for AI training and inference, has grown faster.
Water
Google consumed about 8.1 billion gallons of water in 2024, mostly at data centers, up about 28% from the previous year. The company replenished about 4.5 billion gallons through watershed projects, equivalent to 64% of its freshwater consumption, against a goal of replenishing 120% by 2030.
Many of Google's data centers use evaporative cooling, which consumes water but uses less electricity than air-based or closed-loop systems. The trade-off between water and power use is a central design choice for data center operators, and it varies by local climate and water availability. In water-stressed regions, operators face growing scrutiny of their consumption from local authorities and communities.
What the numbers say about AI and the grid
The report illustrates two trends that are visible across the technology sector. First, data center electricity demand is growing rapidly, at 27% a year in Google's case. That growth is a significant addition to load in the regions where Google operates, including in the PJM region, the Southeast, the Midwest, Oregon and Nevada in the United States, and in Europe and Asia.
Second, how that growth translates into emissions depends heavily on clean power procurement and accounting methods. Google's data center energy emissions fell because it contracted more clean power than its load growth. That does not mean grids serving its data centers have no fossil generation. Utilities in several of the states where Google operates are building new gas plants partly to serve data center demand.
The growth in Scope 3 emissions from construction points to a less visible issue. Each new data center embeds large amounts of carbon in materials and equipment before it consumes a single kilowatt-hour. As the pace of construction rises, these embodied emissions can outweigh reductions in operational emissions.
Nuclear and geothermal
Google's 2024 contracts included agreements for advanced nuclear and enhanced geothermal power. In October 2024 the company signed an agreement with Kairos Power for small modular reactors, and it has partnered with Fervo Energy on geothermal in Nevada. These technologies offer firm, around-the-clock supply that complements wind and solar, which matters for hourly matching. They also carry higher costs and longer timelines, and most of the contracted nuclear capacity will not be available until the 2030s.
Avoided emissions and enabled reductions
Google's report also includes figures beyond its own footprint. It estimates that the clean power it has contracted since 2010 has avoided about 44 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent, and that five AI-enabled products, including the Nest thermostat and fuel-efficient routing in Google Maps, helped users cut emissions by about 26 million metric tons in 2024. These are estimates of avoided emissions, which are calculated against counterfactual baselines and are not subtracted from the company's reported inventory. Accounting standards treat them separately for that reason.
What to watch
Key indicators in Google's next report will be whether the share of hourly carbon-free energy keeps rising as load grows, whether Scope 3 emissions from construction continue to climb, and how water consumption changes as new facilities using different cooling designs come online. Regulators and utilities in the regions where Google is building will also be watching whether the company's large-load contracts include commitments on flexibility, such as reducing consumption during grid emergencies.