The world’s 20 largest data center companies have set ambitious targets to cut the carbon emissions from their giant portfolios. The vast majority of them are moving in the wrong direction — fast.

These businesses include technology giants like Google, Amazon and Meta and owner-developers like Blackstone's QTS and Digital Realty. The revelations from a first-of-its-kind investigation by Bisnow show that time is running out for these companies to achieve the environmental targets they committed to before the growth of artificial intelligence spurred a huge acceleration in the data center build-out. 

Data center development is expanding exponentially, and the companies that own and use data centers primarily rely on fossil fuels to power them, creating emissions that are heating the globe. Many are building their own gas-burning power plants to ensure they get more computing power online faster.

That means the path to limiting carbon output to a level that keeps climate change in check is getting far narrower, experts told Bisnow. With data center construction responsible for an increasingly large share of economic growth in the U.S. and beyond, money is trumping the environment. 

“People do not properly monitor what is going on and do not know the scale of the problem,” Kaveh Madani, director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health and lead author of a comprehensive evaluation of AI’s energy use, told Bisnow.

“Or at the time they become aware of the impacts, it’s too late to do things.”

Emissions created by three-quarters of the firms analyzed by Bisnow rose in the last year for which they reported such data — in some cases doubling or tripling. 

Six data center hyperscalers alone put 171 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere in the last year for which they provided figures, Bisnow found, 30 million more than the previous year — the equivalent of 7 million extra cars over the course of a year or burning 70 million barrels of oil.

For a handful of companies, carbon emissions fell, depending on the criteria you use. Not a single company analyzed by Bisnow could say unequivocally that, using any of the potential metrics for measuring carbon output that are considered plausible, it had cut emissions. 

These figures don't always cover the biggest source of carbon emissions created by data centers, Bisnow’s investigation also found. There is a huge gap between the full picture and the public pronouncements data center owners make when it comes to sustainability. 

But by any measure, emissions from data centers are soaring, and their impacts are only set to grow in the coming years.

Data centers already have an enormous carbon footprint. They collectively consumed 448 terawatt-hours of electricity last year. Put another way, if they were a country, they would have ranked 11th globally, just behind France, in terms of power consumption, according to a June report from the United Nations University.

That rate of energy usage would nearly double by 2030 if current trends hold, the UN University said. The four biggest tech companies alone have committed to spending a combined $2.4T on building out digital infrastructure by then.

Many of these businesses are innovating ways to make their facilities more energy- and water-efficient, and in some cases, they are funding renewable energy projects to either power centers or add more renewable energy to power grids.

Pressure from data center occupiers and global investors is pushing owners toward using renewable energy, as is increasing scrutiny and hostility from local communities in the areas where ever-larger data centers are planned.

But national and international governing bodies are rolling back regulation that could push data center owners and occupiers to use more renewable energy sources. In the U.S., the world's largest data center market, the federal government has withdrawn support for solar and wind power and encouraged more burning of fossil fuels. 

“I'm a capitalist,” U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in May at Bisnow’s National Data Center Investment Conference and Expo. “If data center developers want to build this kind of power or that kind of power, I don't care. I just care about math and speed.”

On the other side of the Atlantic, the European Union is also watering down data center climate regulation. 

All the while, the planet is on track to experience its hottest year ever. Deadly heatwaves and wildfires are sweeping the globe. Last year, 13.6 million people were displaced by weather disasters, more than 37,000 per day, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.

“When you think about the way the world is functioning right now, the fragmentation, the deprioritization of addressing climate change issues, and the massive growth that we are seeing in terms of energy demand boosted by the further rapid growth of the AI and data sector, [that] should make us nervous about what would be achievable or feasible,” the UN’s Madani said. 

Heading In The Wrong Direction

Amazon, which has long touted its Climate Pledge to achieve net-zero emissions by 2040, emitted 16% more carbon in 2025 than in 2024, the company’s recently released sustainability report showed, driven predominantly by data center construction. 

Compared to some of its fellow hyperscalers, which both own data centers directly and occupy them as a tenant, that growth seems modest. But that is 11 million metric tons of carbon added to the atmosphere, its sustainability report says — the amount produced in a year by 2.5 million cars or burning 30 million barrels of oil, according to Environmental Protection Agency equivalence estimates.

And there is more to come. The Seattle-based cloud provider is planning to develop a power plant in West Texas to power a data center campus that could be the largest polluter in the country, The New York Times reports.

Firms are in the ramp-up stage of construction and development, and in the U.S. in particular, fossil fuels are the most readily available source of energy. In the race to build as fast as possible, data center companies are harnessing that now and deferring the moment when they address the issue of carbon emissions.

Bisnow undertook an analysis of the decarbonization targets of the world’s 20 largest data center firms, incorporating owners and hyperscalers. The investigation then compared those targets with the actual level of emissions produced by those companies to see how ambition measured up against reality.  

The list was compiled using a ranking undertaken by Data Centre Magazine, and information on the individual companies analyzed can be found in the interactive graphic below. Data on emissions was taken from public filings made by the companies, and companies were contacted about their climate goals and decarbonization strategies.

Where the data is available, the facts are stark: Emissions for some of the world’s largest data center companies are going up sharply rather than down, including among those with the most ambitious targets.

Among the 20 companies analyzed, 17 clearly disclose their annual level of carbon emissions, although they don’t all use the same metrics. Of those, 13 said their emissions rose in the most recent year they disclosed, no matter the metric used. 

You can use the interactive graphic below to explore data on the individual companies analyzed. Hover over the circles to find all the data on individual companies. Group companies according to information such as whether their decarbonization target covers things like tenant information technology load or embodied carbon (the carbon emitted during construction and development), and whether their emissions rose or fell.

You can also visualize and compare how quickly emissions are growing for different companies.

The largest year-over-year increase was reported by Oracle, the Austin-based company led by billionaire Larry Ellison, which produced 194% or 157% more carbon emissions in 2025 compared to 2024, depending on the measurement technique used. It struck a $300B deal in September to provide data center capacity to ChatGPT maker OpenAI.

Vantage, the owner-operator owned by investors including Digital Bridge and Silver Lake, more than doubled its emissions, rising 145%, in 2023 before the global AI race fully took hold. It hasn't published more recent data.

Blackstone-owned QTS' emissions jumped 59% in 2024, and it hasn’t yet disclosed the figure for 2025.

Under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, the world's most widely used international standard for carbon accounting, location-based carbon is emitted by the grid where the user actually consumed the power. Market-based emissions are those a company can claim to have emitted based on electricity contracts or renewable energy certificates a user purchased.

Alibaba Cloud, Digital Realty, CyrusOne, GDS Holdings and Stack Infrastructure's tracked emissions fell in their most recent reportable years by one metric but rose by the other.  

Among the other hyperscalers, Google reported a 29% increase in location-based carbon emissions and an 18% increase in market-based emissions in 2025.

“While we remain deeply committed to sustainability, reaching our climate moonshot is getting harder,” Google acknowledged in its 2026 sustainability report.

Its electricity demand load — electricity used to power data centers — surged 37% year-over-year in 2025, which it said was tempered by AI-stack efficiencies. 

“Growing our data center footprint to build out the infrastructure needed to make AI as helpful as possible to everyone requires energy and resources,” the report says. 

Google is working within energy systems that aren’t clean or flexible enough yet, it said, as long waits to connect to the grid, fragmented markets, supply chain delays and regulatory bottlenecks delay carbon-free energy from coming online.

Microsoft reported a 25% increase in market-based emissions and a 15% increase in location-based emissions in 2025, while Meta saw 11% and 10% increases in the same categories in 2024. But the owner of Facebook and Instagram has among the largest planned pipelines of data center capacity because of a strategy to start offering cloud storage to other businesses.

“Our value chain emissions continue to fluctuate as our business expands and recently constructed data centers come online,” Meta said in its 2025 sustainability report. “This underscores the long‑term efforts needed to decouple emissions growth from anticipated business growth.”

But at Meta's largest data center project, a reported $250B development in rural Louisiana, the company plans to build 10 new gas-burning plants to power the campus, Bloomberg reported. The company also recently dropped out of a major clean energy pact. 

At the May Bisnow conference, former Google Vice President of Data Centers Joseph Kava said the sheer scale of the build-out, combined with fewer renewable energy projects in which to invest, makes it unlikely that the hyperscale operators will be able to hit their emission reduction targets.

“It's not that they're not committed to it. It's just going to take longer to achieve than they had contemplated back when they made the commitment,” Kava said. “So [it] won't be 100% by 2030, in my opinion.”

Carbon Omissions

Even as the industry's emissions soar, almost all of the companies have a decarbonization strategy of some sort in place for their data center portfolios, Bisnow’s analysis found.

The only exception is COPT Defense Properties, a REIT with 31 data centers that primarily serves the U.S. government. The company didn’t respond to requests for comment on its data center decarbonization goals and didn’t have a publicly available portfolio-wide decarbonization goal beyond a 2025 reporting benchmark. 

In terms of the timelines companies have set to decarbonize their operations, 80% are in line with the targets outlined in the Paris Agreement, which means companies need to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 at the latest. 

But drilling into the detail of the targets and strategies data center firms are rolling out reveals omissions that call into question whether their true carbon footprints are being understood.

Of the 14 data center owner-developers analyzed, half didn't include the power utilized for the IT load of their customers within the decarbonization targets set, Bisnow found. That is the electricity needed to power the servers that data centers house, and it typically accounts for about 75% of the potential emissions a data center will produce over its lifetime, according to data from the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute and the Uptime Institute.

That means more than half of the world’s largest data center owner-developers aren't tracking the largest source of emissions their assets produce. Some of their tenants will measure and have plans to cut these emissions, but some won’t.

Data center owners can thus say they are cutting their carbon emissions while the carbon produced by their assets is rising. 

All six of the hyperscalers analyzed by Bisnow include these emissions in their decarbonization targets — as the company ultimately using the computing power, they are directly responsible for these emissions. 

Unlike with other forms of commercial real estate, embodied carbon, which is emitted during the development process from activities like the manufacture of steel, glass and concrete, doesn’t account for the majority of emissions for data center companies. But the roughly 5% it does account for is still a large figure on an absolute basis, and a third of the companies in the analysis don't include these embodied carbon emissions in their targets. 

Attempts To Change

The data center industry isn't naive to the scale of the problem, and companies across the sector are attempting to develop new technologies and lower emissions, a process that is to some degree being driven by the imperatives of the market. 

A growing cohort of data center occupiers — the end users that buy the compute power provided by data centers — are demanding that owners provide them with the ability to purchase renewable energy, in facilities that are at the cutting edge of efficiency, industry players said. 

“[At one time, on a request for proposals,] sustainability would have been No. 62 on the list of requirements,” Kao Data Senior Vice President Adam Nethersole told Bisnow. “It would have been behind, ‘Is there a vending machine in the reception?’”

Today, sustainability is in the top three questions, he said, below power availability and reliability. Kao is a UK data center developer, subjecting it to harsher scrutiny of environmental impacts than its U.S. counterparts.

In some parts of the world, access to renewable energy is determining where developers build their data centers, making them inherently more sustainable. 

Echelon, a Dublin-headquartered data center developer that is backed by Starwood Capital, has adopted what it calls a “power-first” strategy and has moved its facilities away from traditional urban locations and toward areas that are more remote but that have better access to renewable power sources. 

Echelon has struck a joint venture with Spanish utilities company Iberdola to build its data centers in locations where they can be supplied with renewable energy — sunny Spain has invested heavily in solar infrastructure.  

“That is the direction of travel for most of the hyperscalers, for most of the larger tech players, so there is good alignment between our and the customer strategy,” Echelon Chief Marketing Officer Damien Gaynor said. 

Data center hyperscalers are keenly aware of how much energy their facilities will use — and the public scrutiny that is drawing. The biggest players have pledged to turn to nuclear power as they scale faster than grids can turn away from fossil fuels.

In 2024, Amazon bought a nuclear-powered data center in Pennsylvania, Google teamed up with a nuclear power company to create a “fleet” of nuclear projects, and Meta put out a request for proposals for developers that could help it to develop nuclear power.

But those projects, along with the data center industry’s capacity to execute on other clean energy technologies, are still years away, impractical to power the construction boom fully underway.

“There's a lot of forward focus on nuclear [small modular reactors] and fusion hydrogen technologies and fuel cells and battery storage,” EY Americas Climate and Decarbonization Manager Shannon Roberts said. “But I think we're also still seeing there's a reality in the market where these technologies are not at scale, and in some cases, companies are having to obtain power from traditional sources.”

Fossil Fuels Rule

Decarbonizing data centers requires cleaner energy grids, which means significant investment in transmission and generation systems. That would reduce the amount of “behind-the-meter” power created by natural gas and other fossil fuels, said Lindsey Bruner, chief operating officer for CleanArc Data Centers, which leverages off-site manufacturing to create clean energy solutions for hyperscale data centers.

The data center industry’s work toward sustainability and clean energy is “definitely not as transparent to the general public as it should be, and that's one of the reasons that you see a ton of pushback in communities against data centers,” she said. 

CleanArc pitches itself as an alternative to the “greenwashing” concern that comes with the purchase of renewable energy credits, which allow companies to burn fossil fuels for their operations, then offset their reported emissions by funding activities like planting trees and researching new sustainable technology.

It can be hard to separate the companies that are seeking out ways to incentivize clean energy development from those buying credits, Dutch AI and climate researcher Alex deVries-Gao said.

“These companies are buying renewable energy, but I think the critical question is, to what extent are you actively investing into renewable energy infrastructure and not just buying green energy on paper?” he said.

While data centers aren’t the sole party responsible for AI-linked emissions, the AI industry was responsible for releasing as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2025 as New York City did as a whole, de Vries-Gao’s research found.

At the moment, rather than focusing solely on renewable energy investment, hyperscalers and data center owners are investing massively in new power that will be generated using fossil fuels at a rate that will hugely increase the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. 

That is particularly the case in the U.S., which, with about 4,100 data centers, according to the UN, is by far the biggest market in the world and therefore has the biggest impact on global emissions. The EU is the second-largest market, with about 2,400 facilities. 

There are at least 74 natural gas-fired power plants planned in the U.S. today solely to power data centers, according to research published last month by the Environmental Integrity Project.

Those power plants are expected to generate about 662 tons of greenhouse gases each year, the same amount as Australia, EIP said. 

On top of that, there are more gas-fired power stations being constructed that will provide energy for the grid more generally that are being built because of the increased capacity needed to power data centers. 

The EIP analysis doesn't cover coal-fired power stations that are also being built to power data centers, but the U.S. government is spending $350M to build or reopen coal plants that combined would generate 4 gigawatts of energy.

Data center companies have options as to where they build, deVries-Gao said. Selecting locations where the grid is powered by fossil fuels, or building their own gas- or coal-fired power stations, is a choice to prioritize building more AI capacity over reducing potential harm to the climate.

“That's going to cause increased consumption of fossil fuels, because that's apparently the main source of power,” he said. “If you drive up a certain power demand, you share the responsibility for the carbon emissions that occur as a result.”