Google's climate report says its emissions fell 2% and rose 18% in the same year

Google's 2026 Environmental Report says the company's operational emissions fell 2% last year. The same report says its total emissions rose 18%, to about 14.5 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent, which is 81% above its 2019 baseline. Both numbers are real. They measure different things, and the gap between them is where the AI buildout lives.

The smaller number is Scope 1 plus market-based Scope 2: the fuel Google burns and the electricity it buys, with clean-power contracts netted against it. That came to roughly 2.9 million tons. The bigger number adds Scope 3, everything upstream, and Scope 3 is now close to 80% of Google's footprint. Servers, chips, networking gear, and the steel and concrete for the buildings that hold them.

Microsoft published its own report a week later, on July 9, and it splits the same way, only harder. Total emissions were about 20.3 MtCO2e in fiscal 2025, up from 16.2 the year before, a 25% jump. Scope 3 was 85.8% of the total. The single biggest line is capital goods at 44.6%, which is what it costs in carbon to build the data centers before any of them run a workload.

What "operational emissions fell" is measured against

Market-based Scope 2 accounting lets a company subtract clean electricity it has contracted for from the grid power it actually consumed. It is a legitimate method, it is the one the GHG Protocol blesses, and it is also the reason a company can add gigawatts of load and still report flat or falling operational emissions. Google reported a 37% year-over-year increase in electricity load in 2025 and a 2% decrease in operational emissions. Both of those sentences come out of the same spreadsheet.

Microsoft's report contains the most useful thing in either document, which is what happens when you stop doing the cheap version of this. Its Scope 2 emissions went from roughly 2% of its footprint to about 13% in a single year. Microsoft says that is a deliberate move away from unbundled renewable energy certificates, the kind that let you claim a megawatt-hour of clean power without any new clean power getting built, toward contracts for new carbon-free generation. The reported number went up because the accounting got stricter. That is worth saying plainly: a company's emissions line rising can mean the company got more honest, and there is no way to tell from the headline figure alone.

The concrete problem

Both companies' totals are climbing because of construction. A data center is a building. Microsoft's capital goods bucket is cement, steel, servers, semiconductors, cooling equipment, and it emits before the first rack powers on. Google names the same drivers: purchased goods, capital equipment, construction materials.

That has a couple of consequences worth being precise about:

• Embodied carbon is front-loaded. A campus emits most of its construction carbon before it serves a single token, so a buildout year looks worse than a steady-state year even if the finished facility runs on clean power.
• Efficiency does not fix it. Google's fleet averages a PUE of 1.09, which is about as good as air-cooled data centers get. PUE measures overhead on the power you use. It says nothing about the cement.
• The fix is procurement, not code. Both companies are pushing suppliers: Google's Clean Energy Addendum asks key hardware suppliers to run on 100% clean electricity by the end of 2029, with more than 75 signed on; Microsoft says green steel, low-carbon concrete and mass timber can cut embodied carbon in some data centers by up to 35%.

Kate Brandt, Google's chief sustainability officer, put the constraint in the report itself: the company's "AI infrastructure buildout is currently accelerating faster than the grid is decarbonizing." Microsoft's version: "Our results reflect both progress and pressure."

The aggregate

The Guardian added up Microsoft, Amazon and Google and got 119 million metric tons of CO2e, up nearly a fifth year over year, or roughly a third of France's national emissions. Amazon's own increase was 16% overall and 20% in supply chain emissions, which is the same construction story. The comparison to France is a scale device, not a like-for-like: a country's inventory and a company's Scope 1-2-3 disclosure are built with different boundaries, and corporate Scope 3 double counts across firms, since somebody's Scope 3 is somebody else's Scope 1. Treat it as an order of magnitude.

Neither company has moved its target. Microsoft still says carbon negative by 2030 and, by 2050, removal of everything it has emitted since 1975. It contracted about 45 million tons of removals in fiscal 2025 across 29 projects, which is more than double its annual footprint on paper, and remains the largest corporate buyer of carbon removal. Google still holds a 2030 net-zero goal and calls it a moonshot that is "getting harder."

What has changed is which number tells you anything. Operational emissions were the metric of the cloud era, when the question was how efficiently you ran the machines you already had. In a buildout, the machines are the emissions, and the honest figure is the one with the concrete in it.