As the world grapples with the escalating realities of climate change, the emergence of artificial intelligence has opened a digital Pandora’s box.
The technology once built to save the planet through AI-powered forecasting, satellite imagery, smart grids, and early warning systems, is harming the Earth due to its massive energy and water demands and computing powers, leading to a surging carbon footprint.
But when some tech giants claim that their AI system would reduce carbon emissions and prevent climate breakdown, hope rekindles among the people who are bearing the brunt of the climate crisis.
According to the UN’s climate chief Simon Stiell, artificial intelligence will be helpful in tackling global heating and reducing carbon from industrial processes through efficient tools.
For instance, Google also claimed in a 2023 blogpost that AI could be able to slash 5-10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 if the technology scales.
A report from the International Energy Agency also stated that AI could cut global emissions by up to 5 percent by 2035.
Unfortunately, the recent report commissioned by non-profits including Climate Action Against Disinformation has called all these claims as “AI climate hoax.”
According to the report, the promises of tech giants, such as Google, Microsoft, have fallen flat, showing no promising signs of AI-based solutions to tackle climate change and reduce carbon footprint.
The report did not find a single significant example where “popular tools such as Google’s Gemini or Microsoft’s Copilot were leading to a material, verifiable, and substantial” reduction in planet-heating emissions.
“Even if these benefits are real, they are unrelated to - and dwarfed by - the massive expansion of energy use from the generative AI industry,” the press release added.
According to the analysis of 154 statements made by tech companies and the International Energy Agency based on “green claims”
36 percent cited no evidence at all.
Only 26 percent were supported by published academic research.
The report also argues that the tech industry is using “greenwashing” tactics to justify the massive energy demands of generative AI. The companies are misleadingly credit-linking the environmental benefits of “old-school” machine learning with the high emission reality of modern generative AI.
In reality, generative AI models have led to an increasing surge in data centers, which in turn guzzling high water and energy demands.
Sasha Luccioni, AI and climate lead at Hugging Face, an open-source AI platform and community, said,
“When we talk about AI that’s relatively bad for the planet, it’s mostly generative AI and large language models.”
“When we talk about AI that’s ‘good’ for the planet, it’s often predictive models, extractive models, or old-school AI models,” she added.
According to a study published in the journal Patterns, data centres alone may have emitted between 32.6 million and 79.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2025, which is roughly equivalent to the annual emissions of a small European country.