Amazon spits out record-level pollution to run AI data centers

The demand boom brought by the AI era has made Amazon the owner of a sad environmental record, beyond its financial successes. The company's latest sustainability report reveals that the environmental cost of efforts to expand AI infrastructure has reached staggering levels. Amazon's pledge last year to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 has unfortunately been overshadowed by these record increases in the remaining year.

According to the details of the report, Amazon's total electricity consumption in 2025 increased by a massive 34% compared to the previous year, and this caused a 16% rise in greenhouse gas emissions. This table, reaching the highest emission figure in the company's history, also brought with it the fact that data centers consumed nearly 2.5 billion gallons of water last year just for cooling and operations. These data are concrete evidence of how much the tech giant's growth rate contradicts its environmental sustainability goals.

The emission increase was not limited only to the company's direct activities, but also pointed to a 10% increase in carbon emissions from indirect sources, namely production supply chains, compared to last year, and a 21% increase compared to 2019. Despite sustainability claims, the fact that these figures were tucked away on page 46 of the 51-page report was interpreted as a strategy to conceal this fact from the public. There is a serious mismatch between this presentation style and the transparency expectations of consumers and environmentalists.

In order to ignore or mitigate critical findings, Amazon tries to manage the public opinion with more flashy but out-of-context initiatives like fighting super pollutants. By focusing on certain pollutants which it claims are more harmful than carbon emissions, the company aims to screen its main problem, its record-breaking carbon footprint. Although a commitment of 100 million dollars was made in the report to eliminate super pollutants, no concrete information was shared about how much of this amount will come out of Amazon's own pocket.

This joint initiative, which also includes giants like Google, Salesforce, and JPMorgan, is considered the most concrete example of corporate 'greenwashing' activities Amazon uses to mask its environmental impacts. Given incidents like Amazon retaliating against its own employees for questioning AI data centers, criticisms that the company puts environment and ethical values in the background for the sake of profit hunger are growing stronger. The rapid rise in AI spending has deeply shaken the company's eco-friendly image.