Big Tech emissions rose 150% in 3 years as AI booms, UN body says
Four of the world's biggest artificial intelligence (AI) companies saw the indirect carbon emissions of their work grow by over 150 percent in the last three years, according to a report from a United Nations agency for digital technolgoies.
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) tracked the emissions, energy use, and climate commitments of 200 leading digital companies between 2020 and 2023 using public databases.
The report found that Amazon, Microsoft, Google's parent company Alphabet, and Meta have seen a rise in emissions that is either produced or purchased by the companies because of "expanding data infrastructure and energy use".
Indirect emissions are those that come from purchased electricity, heat, steam, or electricity use, like in data centres, telecommunication networks, or office buildings.
Amazon saw the highest emissions increase at over 182 per cent in 2023 compared to 2020, followed by Microsoft at 155 per cent, Meta at 145 per cent, and Alphabet at 138 per cent, according to the report.
The consumption of data centres, which power the AI models that these companies are working on, also rose 12 percent year over year from 2017 to 2023, which is four times faster than global energy growth.
The report "underscores the urgent need to manage AI's environmental impact," the ITU said in a statement.
Euronews Next reached out to the relevant technology companies regarding this report but did not receive an immediate reply.
The report also found that half the assessed companies in their report had committed to reaching net-zero by at least 2050 if not earlier.
Despite these actions, the report found that overall emissions still rose meaning that net-zero targets "have not yet translated into real-world reductions".
The growth of artificial intelligence (AI) in our lives is officially unprecedented, according to the woman dubbed the "Queen of the Internet".
Mary Meeker, a venture capitalist known for her internet trend insights, released a 340-page report titled 'Trends - Artificial Intelligence,' where copious research and charts show what she characterises as the 'unprecedented' pace of change in which AI is being invested in, developed, adopted, and used.
Meeker ran capital firm Kleiner Perkins' growth practice during the 2010s, where she invested in future tech giants like Facebook, Spotify, and Canva.
A profile in Forbes credits her with predicting the rise of Apple, Google, and the digital economy with her previous trend reports.
'To say the world is changing at unprecedented rates is an understatement,' Meeker, now the co-founder of venture capital fund Bonds, writes in the new report's introduction.
One of the staggering charts of the report shows that ChatGPT, OpenAI's AI chatbot, reached 800 million users by April 2025, a couple of years after its initial launch in October 2022.
The company's revenue also skyrocketed in a similar fashion; from zero in 2022 to just under $4 billion (€3.5 billion) by 2025.
Based on user data, the rise of ChatGPT, in particular, is history's biggest 'overnight success,' nine years after the company was founded in late 2015, Meeker wrote.
"And, unlike the Internet 1.0 revolution, where technology started in the USA and steadily diffused globally - ChatGPT hit the world stage all at once growing in most global regions simultaneously," according to the report.
The report shows that ChatGPT reached 100 million global users in less than 2 months after its launch, the fastest technology to do so.
In comparison, it took Facebook 4.5 years to reach the same number of users after its launch in the early 2000s.
Meeker estimates in the report that it will take three years for a majority of households to adopt AI technology, down from the 12 years it took for households to start using desktop internet regularly.
There are various factors at play for the 'rapid and transformative' rise of AI, Meeker writes in the report.
There's general buy-in from new AI company founders and more traditional companies for AI adoption, Meeker contends, demonstrated by cash flows being "increasingly directed" towards AI "in efforts to drive growth and fend off investors".
The report notes that technology's biggest players, including NVIDIA, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and China's Baidu have all increased the mentions of AI in their corporate earnings reports to shareholders since 2022.
That, paired with a new wave of AI company founders that are "extremely aggressive" with all stages of the AI product development - from innovation, to product releases, acquisitions, cash burn, and capital raises - means that AI 'user and usage trending is ramping materially faster' than before.
The report also noted that the number of new AI models has gone up 167 percent year over year since 2020, and the size of the data sets they are using is up 260 percent in the same period.
Meeker notes that the decrease in costs to develop new models is also unprecedented.
Citing Stanford research, the report shows inference costs for those that use the tech have dropped 99 per cent over two years, even though the cost of training a model is up to $1 billion dollars (€850 million).
The pace at which competitors can match each other on the market is unparalleled. For instance, Meeker notes that NVIDIA's 2024 Blackwell GPU chip, which helps train AIs to do what users expect, has 105,000 times less energy per token than the 2014 Kepler model.
"It's a staggering leap, not just of cost reduction, but of architectural and materials innovation that is reshaping what's possible at the hardware level," she writes.
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