After years of touting ambitious climate goals, big tech companies are now facing new scrutiny over what they disclose about AI's environmental footprint.

Why it matters: The AI boom is turning a handful of tech companies into defining players in the debate over electricity and water use. Their willingness to disclose these impacts is becoming almost as important as the impacts themselves.

Driving the news: New environmental reports from Google, Amazon and Microsoft show emissions and water use continuing to rise as AI infrastructure expands — while revealing differences in what the companies disclose.

• "There is a bit of a reluctance to share a lot of things in this competitive dynamic and also with these being public companies," said Boris Gamazaychikov, who co-founded Sustainable AI Group, a new research and advisory firm that helps companies address the environmental impacts of AI.

The big picture: Transparency is emerging as a key response to growing opposition to AI focused on data centers' energy and water toll.

Friction point: United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres this week called on tech companies to publicly disclose the "full footprint" of their data centers, including carbon, water and land use, reiterating the U.N.'s AI Environmental Transparency Initiative unveiled last month.

State of play: Top executives at these tech companies generally say they support transparency, but their reporting varies widely once you dig into the disclosures.

• No law requires companies to detail many of these AI-related environmental metrics, and no common reporting standard exists for those that are disclosed.

What they're saying: Kara Hurst, the chief sustainability officer at Amazon, said in an interview before the UN announcement that all companies building data centers should disclose their environmental footprints.

Catch up quick: Comparing the companies' disclosures is a complicated apples-to-oranges exercise.

• Alex de Vries-Gao, a researcher at VU Amsterdam university and founder of online platform Digiconomist, reviewed the latest disclosures and ranks them, on transparency alone, as Meta first, followed by Google and Microsoft in a "toss-up" for second, and Amazon last.
• Meta's 2026 report is expected later this year.

Zoom in: Transparency doesn't necessarily equal top performance, and no company leads across every measure, according to de Vries-Gao's analysis published earlier this year and these latest reports.

• Go deeper on how each company ranks by clicking here.

Between the lines: Beyond the water needs for cooling at a data center, generating electricity from fossil fuels and nuclear power also requires large amounts of water, and some experts say tech companies should account for that.

• Judging by 2025 disclosures from Meta (the only one to disclose this figure), indirect water use was roughly 24 times larger than the amount used at its data centers, de Vries-Gao calculated.
• "We don't know whether that ratio is representative of the rest of the industry because the other companies don't disclose comparable figures," he said.

What we're watching: Gamazaychikov, of Sustainable AI Group, says pressure from these tech companies' customers, like consumer brands, will likely prompt more transparency and accountability in the absence of government action.

Full story

📈 Crack spreads — energy industry measures of the gap between crude prices and refined products like diesel — have soared in recent days as the global fuel picture is increasingly determined by global politics and war.

• Why it matters: Crack spreads are basically the profit margin that refiners add on top of the price of a barrel of crude in order to come up with the prices they charge for refined products like diesel.
• What we're watching: Because the crack spread for diesel fuel, charted above, is rising, diesel fuel will likely get more expensive. Full story

😮‍💨 Global oil inventories rose in June for the first time four months, "as sharply higher oil on water volumes more than offset continued draws in onshore tanks," the International Energy Agency said today.

• Why it matters: IEA's latest outlook tells a story of gradual market recovery — but warns that it's extremely fragile and could go into reverse.
• What we're watching: The market is heading for a surplus by the end of the year, but that hinges on continued recovery of tanker flows — hardly a sure thing in light of renewed hostilities, IEA warns.

🛑 The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is preventing — for now — the Chicago Mercantile Exchange from allowing 24/7 trading of oil futures contracts.

• Why it matters: CFTC isn't certain whether the plan is consistent with the commission's "statutory core principles," chairman Michael Selig said. Go deeper

Microsoft's latest environmental report shows the growing tension between its race to build AI infrastructure and its long-standing climate commitments.

Driving the news: Microsoft's total greenhouse gas emissions are up 25%, fueled by both its growth in digital infrastructure, especially AI, and changes to the company's electricity procurement strategy.

• The company said a key measure of data center water-use efficiency improved 25% from its 2022 baseline, putting it on track toward a goal of improving that metric 40% by 2030.

State of play: Big Tech climate goals established earlier this decade are becoming harder to achieve as AI infrastructure expands.

• Microsoft chief sustainability officer Melanie Nakagawa declined to directly reaffirm whether the company remains on track to meet its goal of becoming carbon negative by 2030, instead emphasizing the broader challenge facing the industry.

"Many of the sustainability solutions are not scaling fast enough to keep pace with AI infrastructure growth," she said.

Stunning stat: Microsoft's reported emissions from purchased electricity jumped 945% between 2024 and 2025, while its electricity consumption increased 24%.

• Much of that increase reflects Microsoft's decision to move away from relying on renewable energy certificates from existing projects that don't necessarily spur new clean energy development.
• Instead, it says it's moving toward investments that help finance new carbon-free electricity.

"This decision shows up as increasing our reported emissions in the near term," said Nakagawa. "But we believe it creates greater long-term environmental value because it actually helps expand carbon-free electricity capacity and generation on the grids that we need it to be in."

Full story

Understanding FERC's Large Load Orders (RMI)

Ben says: I recommend bookmarking this one from RMI, a clean energy think tank. It's a lucid — yet in-depth — primer on FERC's push for grid operators to improve how they enable data centers without sticking other ratepayers with the bill.

In Ohio, solar is no big threat to farmland (Canary Media)

Amy says: Taking a page from the tech sector's book, the solar industry is pointing out how little farmland it actually takes up compared to other industries (golf courses keep getting thrown under the bus).

Rolling in the Deep (Kimmeridge)

Ben says: Keep this one in mind the next time you read predictions about when shale growth will peter out.

• The energy investment firm's research concludes that costs to find and develop very deep, high-pressure, high-temperature shale resources have plummeted 80% since 2010. It's mostly about gas but has some oil relevance too.

How to stop ChatGPT from ruining how you think (Washington Post)

Amy says: This cites fascinating research on the topic. Tl;dr: Embrace the struggle of thinking!

• The story invokes the analogy of exercise, which most people are not great at. So what should make us think we will be better on the cognitive front?

That's the deal value the FT reports in private equity giant Carlyle's sale of Copia Power — a power and data center developer — to investment heavyweight EQT.

• Why it matters: The scramble to power AI is generating a flurry of dealmaking — and in this case, making a fivefold return for Carlyle in selling the firm it created.