28 entries

Incidents & developments

Everything that moved a score. Negative entries are permit disputes, pollution and emissions jumps; positive entries are disclosures, clean-firm procurement and research that raised the bar.

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HighEmissions·Jul 10, 2026

Microsoft's emissions rise 25% to 20.3 Mt, 58% above its 2020 baseline

Data-centre expansion and a decision to stop counting non-additional renewable certificates pushed FY2025 emissions to 20.29 MtCO₂e. Microsoft still calls its 2030 carbon-negative goal achievable.

Microsoft

HighAir & power·Jul 9, 2026

Stargate Abilene adds 41 gas turbines and 62 diesel generators under a permit written for dry cleaners

A Floodlight and Texas Tribune investigation found Stargate's Abilene campus was authorised to run 10 gas turbines and 62 backup diesel generators through Texas 'permits by rule' that need no environmental study, public notice or comment — and has applied to add 41 turbines and 18 generators more.

OpenAI, Oracle, Crusoe

HighEmissions·Jul 1, 2026

Amazon's emissions jump 16% to 80.9 Mt — its largest rise ever — on record data-centre additions

Amazon's 2025 sustainability report shows absolute emissions of 80.85 MtCO₂e, up 16% in a year, with Scope 2 up 34% on data-centre electricity. AWS still does not disclose how much electricity it uses; the report is limited to PUE (1.14) and WUE.

Amazon

HighEmissions·Jun 30, 2026

Google reports its largest-ever emissions jump: +18% in 2025

Electricity use rose 37% in a single year, total emissions 18%, and freshwater consumption 34% to 10.9 billion gallons — even as operational emissions fell 2% and 12 GW of clean-energy deals were signed.

Google

PositiveEmissions·Jun 30, 2026

Alibaba Cloud's own data centres reach 73.6% clean electricity as net emissions fall 4.6%

Alibaba's FY2026 ESG report puts group clean electricity at 62.2%, Alibaba Cloud's self-built data centres at 73.6% (+9.6 points) and net Scope 1+2 emissions at 2.296 Mt, down 4.6% — while a RMB 380 billion AI build-out is under way.

Alibaba

SevereAir & power·May 14, 2026

xAI installs 19 more gas turbines at Colossus 2, taking the Southaven site to 46 units

Records obtained by the Southern Environmental Law Center show xAI added 19 portable gas turbines to its Colossus 2 campus in Southaven, Mississippi between late March and early May 2026 — 46 units in total against a permit for 41, with more than 500 MW of capacity.

xAI

NotableWater·Apr 10, 2026

xAI pauses the $80M Memphis water-recycling plant it promised; restart pledged for 2027

Colossus 1 needs more than a million gallons of water a day. The greywater plant xAI broke ground on to spare the Memphis Sand aquifer went on 'indefinite pause' in April 2026; after pressure from the mayor the company committed to resume no later than the first quarter of 2027.

xAI

PositiveEmissions·Apr 1, 2026

Tencent's renewable share jumps to 48.5%, with owned data centres at 82.9%

Tencent's Carbon Neutrality Mid-Term Report shows renewable electricity rising from 22.0% in 2024 to 48.5% in 2025, 82.9% at the data centres it owns, with 6.5 billion kWh of green power procured since 2021 and average PUE at 1.246 under a 1.25 cap.

Tencent

MinorMaterials & hardware·Mar 31, 2026

Mistral finances 13,800 GB300 GPUs and 44 MW for its own data centre south of Paris

Mistral raised $830 million in debt to buy 13,800 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs for a 44 MW site at Bruyères-le-Châtel run by Eclairion — a revised version of the 18,000-GPU, 40 MW plan announced with NVIDIA in June 2025. The company targets 200 MW across Europe by end-2027.

Mistral

NotableAir & power·Feb 1, 2026

Nebius swaps 400 MW of gas engines for 328 MW of gas fuel cells at Microsoft's Vineland site — permit pending

The New Jersey campus serving Nebius's $17.4–19.4 billion Microsoft contract is designed for up to 300 MW of IT load with only 5 MW from the grid. The original plan for 400 MW of Bergen gas engines became 328 MW of Bloom Energy fuel cells, which still burn natural gas; Cleanview found the generation unbuilt and its air permit pending.

Nebius, Microsoft

HighAir & power·Jan 15, 2026

Stargate Abilene pairs the Texas grid with ~360 MW of on-site gas

OpenAI's flagship Stargate campus went live in September 2025 with 200+ MW and is scaling toward 1.2 GW. Cleanview's tracking shows 29 gas turbines ordered and roughly 360 MW of behind-the-meter generation built by January 2026.

OpenAI, Crusoe

MinorMaterials & hardware·Dec 24, 2025

NVIDIA pays a reported $20 billion to license Groq's inference chips and hire its founders

NVIDIA confirmed a non-exclusive licensing deal for Groq's LPU inference technology, with Groq's CEO and senior team joining NVIDIA; CNBC put the price at $20 billion. Groq had claimed a tenth of the energy per token of GPUs without publishing a measurement, and keeps operating independently.

NVIDIA, Groq

NotableTransparency·Nov 12, 2025

Anthropic commits $50 billion to US data centres — and 2 GW of TPUs and Azure — without naming a power source

In three weeks Anthropic announced up to one million Google TPUs ('well over a gigawatt' in 2026), $50 billion of Fluidstack-built data centres in Texas and New York, and up to 1 GW on Azure. None of the announcements said where the electricity would come from.

Anthropic

PositiveResearch·Aug 21, 2025

Google publishes a measured per-prompt footprint for Gemini

0.24 Wh, 0.03 gCO₂e and 0.26 mL of water for the median text prompt, measured fleet-wide with idle capacity included. Critics say the water figure leaves out electricity-generation water.

Google

HighAir & power·Aug 20, 2025

Louisiana approves three new gas plants to power Meta's Hyperion

The Louisiana Public Service Commission voted 4–1 to let Entergy build three gas plants (≈2.2 GW) and a $550M transmission line for Meta's Richland Parish AI campus. Meta covers costs for 15 years; afterwards they fall to ratepayers.

EU AI Act obligations begin: energy use must be documented, estimates allowed, disclosure optional

Annex XI requires general-purpose model providers to document energy consumption — or estimate it from compute. The voluntary Code of Practice adds a Model Documentation Form, but public release is only encouraged.

NotableWater·Aug 1, 2025

Johor slows data-centre approvals as a 5.8 GW pipeline — ByteDance at its centre — strains power and water

Malaysia's Johor state runs about 580 MW of data centres today with 5,800 MW planned. ByteDance is anchor tenant of the 110 MW MY06 campus and pledged RM10 billion for an AI hub; the state has begun assessing new projects on power and water efficiency after officials conceded worries about shortages.

ByteDance

PositiveResearch·Jul 22, 2025

Mistral publishes the first peer-reviewed LCA of a frontier model

Mistral Large 2: 20.4 ktCO₂e, 281,000 m³ of water and 660 kg Sb-eq over 18 months; 1.14 gCO₂e and 45 mL per 400-token response. Conducted with Carbone 4 and ADEME.

Mistral

SevereAir & power·Jul 17, 2025

xAI runs 35 gas turbines at Colossus against a permit for 15

Aerial imagery counted 35 methane gas turbines at xAI's Memphis supercomputer — more than double the 15 the Shelby County Health Department permitted. SELC estimates over 2,000 tons of NOx a year.

xAI

NotableEmissions·Jul 16, 2025

Amazon's emissions rise 6% to 68.25 Mt while AWS posts the lowest water intensity disclosed

Absolute emissions grew from 64.38 to 68.25 MtCO₂e in 2024 as carbon intensity per dollar fell 4%. AWS reported PUE 1.15 and WUE 0.15 L/kWh, a 17% improvement.

Amazon

NotableEmissions·Jun 12, 2025

NVIDIA hits 100% renewable electricity as its Scope 3 emissions double to 6.9 Mt

NVIDIA's FY2025 sustainability report shows its own offices and data centres fully matched with renewables and Scope 2 at zero — while emissions from making its chips jumped from 3.5 to 6.9 MtCO₂e as Blackwell ramped. The electricity its sold GPUs will consume is not counted in absolute terms.

NVIDIA

NotableTransparency·Jun 10, 2025

OpenAI's only footprint figure: one sentence in a CEO blog post

Sam Altman wrote that an average ChatGPT query uses 0.34 Wh and 0.000085 gallons of water. No methodology, no definition of 'average', no third-party review.

OpenAI

NotableResearch·Apr 10, 2025

IEA: data centres used 415 TWh in 2024 and will exceed 945 TWh by 2030

Data-centre electricity use is growing around 12% a year — four times faster than total demand. The US accounted for 45% of 2024 consumption, China 25%, Europe 15%.

PositiveResearch·Feb 10, 2025

AI Energy Score launches star ratings for 166 models across 10 tasks

Hugging Face, Salesforce, Cohere and Carnegie Mellon publish an Energy Star-style leaderboard: GPU watt-hours per task, with five relative star bands. Open models are tested automatically; closed models through a sealed sandbox.

Salesforce, Hugging Face, Cohere, Meta, Mistral, Alibaba, DeepSeek, IBM

NotableResearch·Dec 20, 2024

US data centres used 4.4% of the nation's electricity in 2023 — and could hit 12% by 2028

Berkeley Lab's DOE-commissioned report: 176 TWh in 2023, a projected 325–580 TWh in 2028, and 17 billion gallons of direct cooling water plus 211 billion gallons indirectly through electricity.

NotableMaterials & hardware·Oct 28, 2024

Generative AI could produce 2.5 million tonnes of e-waste a year by 2030 — a thousandfold increase

A Nature Computational Science study by Peng Wang and colleagues projects 1.2–5 million tonnes of accumulated e-waste from generative AI by 2030, using the NVIDIA DGX H100 server as its benchmark. Circular measures — longer server lives, component reuse — could cut it by up to 86%.

NVIDIA

PositiveAir & power·Sep 20, 2024

Microsoft signs a 20-year deal to restart Three Mile Island Unit 1

Constellation will bring the ~835 MW reactor back online as the Crane Clean Energy Center, with Microsoft buying its output for data centres from 2028, pending NRC approval.

Microsoft

NotableWater·Dec 16, 2022

The Dalles fought 13 months to hide how much water Google uses — 29% of the city's supply

After The Oregonian requested Google's water records, the city sued the newspaper, with Google funding the fight. Records released in the settlement show 355 million gallons in 2021, nearly triple 2017.

Google