AI Set to Extend Fossil Fuel Dominance

Haley Zaremba

Haley Zaremba is an energy journalist and researcher with more than a decade of professional experience covering global energy systems, land and natural resources, and…

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• Google and Microsoft’s carbon emissions each jumped 25% year-over-year, and Amazon’s rose 16%, with AI-driven data center growth as the main driver.
• Amazon is backing a natural-gas power plant in South Texas that would become the single biggest-emitting power plant in the country, releasing 33 million tons of CO2 a year.
• A new study in Nature’s NPJ Climate Action finds AI’s use inside the fossil fuel sector could add up to 1.8 billion tons of CO2 annually, dwarfing the direct emissions from data centers themselves.

AI’s energy footprint is out of control. Hyperscalers are building out data centers faster than the energy industry can keep up with, pushing for the rapid buildout of any form of energy we have at our disposal, clean or dirty. Silicon Valley’s leadership in the decarbonization movement and bold net-zero pledges are a thing of the past. But a new study warns that the biggest issue with AI’s carbon footprint may not even be its own energy consumption, but rather the industries it is used to support and expand.

Instead of reducing emissions, Big Tech is seeing its carbon footprint expand by double-digit rates driven almost entirely by the AI boom. According to official company figures, the total carbon emissions of Google and Microsoft each skyrocketed by 25% year-over-year from 2025 to 2026, while Amazon’s increased by 16%. Altogether, in the last fiscal year, these three companies emitted as much carbon dioxide as a third of France, at 19 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.

And those numbers are set to keep climbing in the coming years. Amazon made headlines across the globe this week when it was revealed that the firm is investing in a large-scale natural-gas-burning power plant as part of a massive data center development in South Texas that is set to be the single biggest-emitting power plant in the country. If built to currently planned specifications, the facility would be permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide a year.

Michael Thomas, founder of Cleanview, a company that monitors the emissions of Big Tech companies’ data center projects, told the New York Times that the planned Amazon power plant should not be viewed as a one-off, but rather that it “could be a foreshadowing of what’s to come.”

The result of this trend is going to be a complete derailment of Big Tech’s climate pledges and a devastating blow for global progress on decarbonization goals. And while some AI defenders point out that large language models will also be used to make a huge range of systems and sectors more energy efficient, a new paper published NPJ Climate Action, a publication from the highly respected scientific journal Nature, suggests that at the end of the day, AI integration is going to expand global emissions far more than it reduces them, and not by a small margin.

The paper crunches the numbers on AI integration into renewable energies as well as the fossil fuels sector, and the resulting numbers are sobering. The scientists found that, if fossil fuels make economic gains anywhere above zero thanks to AI integration, enabled emissions will exceed avoided emissions. In a scenario where both the fossil fuel and the renewables sector benefit equally from AI gains, global carbon-dioxide emissions will increase by between 0.47 billion tons and 1.8 billion tons a year.

“On the smaller side it’s about the emissions of Mexico annually,” Holly Alpine, one of the co-authors of the research, was recently quoted by the Wall Street Journal.

To achieve net emissions reductions, the renewables sector would have to achieve gains 4- to 5-fold greater than the fossil fuels sector. And that’s highly unlikely, if not impossible, in the current global political climate. “Absent policy steering, AI’s modeled effects increase the carbon intensity of the global economy and reinforce fossil fuel incumbency—outcomes that current analytical and governance frameworks do not fully capture,” the paper states.

The authors conclude that AI is on track to extend the dominance of fossil fuels in the global economy, with devastating consequences for emissions targets. In fact, this impact would far overshadow any direct emissions coming from the data centers that power the AI tools themselves.

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

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