Google’s data center energy use grew 27% in one year, plus eight more takeaways from its 2025 environmental report

In Google’s 10th annual report, the company said it reduced emissions even as its data center electricity consumption rose by 27% in one year

‘Tis the season for environmental sustainability reports, it seems, with the GSMA recently releasing its Mobile Net Zero report on telecom operators’ sustainability progress and Google putting out the tenth annual edition of its company environmental report.

The good news across both of those reports? Emissions are down, as telecom and tech companies purchase more clean energy to meet their growing needs. The downside is that those power needs are growing so fast that they need to pick up the pace if they actually want to make progress on sustainability. Available power isn’t keeping up with demand, creating a major bottleneck for cloud, AI and data center proliferation.

The Google environmental report puts numbers out (though some researchers have questioned whether they are accurate), but it also illustrates some of the company’s efforts to push against the prevailing trends in energy type and availability.

Here are nine key takeaways from the 2025 report.

–Power use grew by 27% in just one year. It was up 17% the prior year and doubled over the past four years. The increase should come as no surprise, with the insatiable demand for power-hungry data centers and the scramble across industries to develop and adopt even more power-intense artificial intelligence-based applications. However, the company took pains to note that its “growing electricity needs aren’t solely driven by AI. The accelerating growth of Google Cloud, continued investments in Search, the expanding reach of YouTube, and more, have also contributed to this overall growth.”

–Increased efficiency offset some impacts. Google says that its data centers “are some of the most efficient in the world” and are delivering more than six times the computing power per unit of electricity than they did five years ago. The company credited its hardware engineering progress in creating chips like its Ironwood Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), which it says is nearly 30 times more power efficient than its first Cloud TPU from 2018.

–Emissions are down. Google calculated that it reduced data center emissions by 12% despite the overall increase in data center energy usage, meaning that it is successfully shifting toward less carbon-intense energy sources.

– Water usage was up 28% in one year. Data centers also rely heavily on water use for cooling purposes. Between 2023 and 2024, Google saw its water usage rise 28% to 8.1 billion gallons — which it says would be the equivalent of annual watering for 54 golf courses in the arid U.S. Southwest. It’s trying to balance out those impacts with water stewardship projects that it says helped to safeguard 4.5 billion gallons of water, or about 64% of its usage.

–Clean energy purchases and projects hit a record high. Last year alone, Google said that it signed 60 new clean energy generation contracts to purchase more than 8 GW. That number is the largest annual total in its history and twice what is contracted for the previous year. Google has purchased renewable energy matching 100% of its usage since 2017, and it is working toward its “climate moonshot” goal of 24/7 carbon-free energy (CFE). In 2023, it was at 64% CFE overall and it increased that percentage by 2% to 66% — but notably, some of its data center regions achieved at least 80% CFE.