AI’s darkest secret.
Faltered Carbon
The already formidable environmental toll of generative AI is even worse than it seems because businesses aren’t being transparent about the emissions given off by their enormous new AI datacenters.
Take Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon and one of the largest cloud computing platforms in the world, which doesn’t provide location-based or data center-specific statistics in its emissions reports. That means it’s impossible to tell how much greenhouse gases the massive facilities — and specifically, ones that host or train AI models — are producing, right at the most important moment for the public and policymakers to be grappling with that information.
“The environmental impact of AWS is not broken out specifically, and you can only find the emissions of Amazon overall,” Benn Caddy at the IT analysis firm Canalys, told the Register. “In fairness, Google and Microsoft similarly publish annual sustainability reports for their wider respective companies, reflecting emissions beyond their cloud businesses.”
Off the Books
Last year, an analysis conducted by The Guardian found that the actual emissions of data centers operated by AI leaders like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, are 662 percent higher than what’s been officially reported. The analysis used data between 2020 and 2022, before the AI rush was in full swing, so it’s almost certain the numbers would be even more dramatic now.
Amazon’s chicanery seems particularly egregious. Its “creative accounting” would have you believe that its emissions have actually gone down. This seems extroardinarily unlikely, the Register notes, given the continued expansion of its data center empire for both cloud computing and AI services. Amazon also doesn’t distinguish between different types of emissions, Caddy told the paper, known as Scope 1, 2 and 3, which describe direct emissions, indirect emissions from electricity purchased, and all other indirect emissions not covered by the first two categories respectively.
Of course, the Bezos-owned company isn’t alone. Heavy hitters like Microsoft and Google don’t report data-center specific emissions, either. They also don’t report data all the same way.
All of them favor the same trick, however: renewable energy certificates. These supposedly certify that a company offset a certain amount of carbon emissions by buying an equivalent amount of renewable energy. In practice, little is done to verify these certificates. But by buying them, tech companies can report lower overall numbers.
Opening Up
Caddy’s firm suggests that, at least in the European Union, the recent adoption of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) will mean that potential customers and businesses that would work with Amazon will expect more transparent emissions data if they’re going to partner with the retail giant. If it doesn’t play ball, it could turn away buyers of its cloud computing services.
“This issue has frustrated sustainability-focused customers and partners alike for years now,” Caddy told the Register, “but as companies prepare for CSRD disclosure, this lack of granular emissions disclosure from AWS can create compliance challenges for EU-based AWS customers.”
In the US, though, attempts to enact similar measures have stalled. The Securities Exchange Commission’s climate disclosure rules adopted in March 2024, which would have standardized how all publicly traded companies listed on the stock exchange reported emissions data, were immediately challenged in the courts and paused.
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