'A wild testament to the obscene bloat and waste of GenAI': Google's electricity consumption is exponentially increasing

As a Brit, I've been thinking a lot about the climate crisis since last month's historic heatwave. With many buildings across the UK designed to retain heat, we're simply not built for 37°C/98.6°F weather. Causes of climate change are numerous, and I know we didn't get here solely due to the advent of AI, but the steep increase in major players' energy consumption as a result definitely isn't helping.

Data analyst Kentan Joshi looked at Google’s latest environmental report and wrote about its recent trends in energy consumption. He said on BlueSky, "Two years ago [the company] flipped from linear to exponential growth, and their climate impact is blowing out, too. A WILD testament to the obscene bloat and waste of GenAI."

Joshi dives into more detail in a blog post, elaborating, "The company’s total electricity consumption jumped from 31 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2024 to 43 TWh in 2025. This is very easily the biggest increase in their electricity consumption ever."

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Though that's pretty damning all on its own, it's not just Google that's seen such a sharp increase in its energy consumption. Over a series of graphs, Joshi compares Google's power usage to other major players such as Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and even Netflix (it's worth noting Amazon stopped disclosing its power consumption data around 2022, so Joshi can only estimate). Though all of these companies have seen an increase in power consumption to varying degrees since at least 2023, Google's uptick remains stark.

Google's power consumption even outstrips the total terawatt hours per year of a number of countries, too. Last year, the company's power demand was greater than that of Slovakia, Ecuador, Ireland, or Nigeria.

NEW BLOG FOR YOU Google's energy consumption numbers in their new climate report are mind-blowing. 2 years ago they flipped from linear to exponential growth, and their climate impact is blowing out, too. A WILD testament to the obscene bloat and waste of GenAI: ketanjoshi.co/2026/07/01/g...

— @ketanjoshi.co (@ketanjoshi.co.bsky.social) 2026-07-02T12:14:43.895Z

Now, obviously, energy consumption is not synonymous with CO2 emissions, and a decent chunk of Google's power supply could be coming from renewable sources. However, Joshi's analysis suggests this may be but a drop in the bucket.

Even after various adjustments accounting for "exclusions from their supply chain and renewable energy procurement claims," Google's emission trends are heading in the opposite direction from the emissions target it set out back in 2021. This is an unsurprising trend, given that Google's 2024 environmental report revealed its greenhouse gas emissions had increased by nearly 50% in the last 5 years.

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Joshi gets right to the point with his criticism, quoting Google's own environmental report as he writes, "If 'AI infrastructure buildout is currently accelerating faster than the grid is decarbonising', then Google shouldn’t be building AI infrastructure. If they are breaching the boundaries of safe operation on a planet that can only take so much, they should stop and consider whether all of this is worth it."

Joshi's entire blog post is full of lovely graphs and analysis that I definitely recommend scrolling through yourself. He's previously offered a debunking of the old 'AI energy consumption is actually very efficient, and could actually help us reduce global emissions' chestnut too.

(Image credit: Akos Stiller - Getty Images)

Basically, if you had the sneaking suspicion that claims about how a single AI prompt uses 'five drops' or ‘one 15th of a teaspoon’ were not meaningful metrics beyond how they attempt to obscure the environmental impact of the wider industry, you may be on to something. Joshi explains that "Text generation by a chatbot is comfortably the lowest energy form of [a] generative system," but obviously AI technologies encompass far more than that.

Joshi has previously argued it's part of a strategy of 'selective disclosure,' writing last year, "What seems like a massive step for transparency and disclosure must be seen in the context of the absence of anything before it. Coming off a baseline of disclosing nothing, the industry can now choose to carefully set the narrative around precisely what they desire and get accolades for doing so."

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