Google's Electricity Use Rose 37% in 2025 While Operational Emissions Fell 2%, Its Environmental Report Says

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.

Google said it is one of the largest corporate buyers of clean energy. 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. 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.

"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. 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. 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.

Google's water stewardship projects replenished about 7.7 billion gallons in 2025, roughly 78% of its freshwater consumption, according to the report. Google's report follows several years in which large technology companies have reported rising emissions linked to data center growth. The distinction between operational and supply chain emissions is central to understanding the numbers.