New report uncovers dangerous tactics used by Google and Microsoft to promote their products: 'Serves as a distraction'

AI data centers are increasingly unpopular amid backlash over air, noise, and water pollution. But tech companies like Google and Microsoft are working overtime to promote their products as a solution to Earth's climate woes. 

While promising tools are indeed emerging, a scathing new report called into question the logic and evidence behind many of these claims.  

What's happening?

In a report backed by leading organizations like Climate Action Against Disinformation, energy analyst Ketan Joshi found that tech companies are lumping together traditional AI and generative AI when claiming climate benefits.

This matters because "artificial intelligence" has been used to describe a broad set of technologies, including "older, smaller and leaner forms of machine learning," since the 1950s. 

However, generative AI is clearly the future, and it consumes up to 14 times more energy than traditional processes. 

"By muddling these two types of AI into one umbrella term, purported climate solutions are coupled to extreme pollution and presented as a package deal," Joshi wrote in his report titled "The AI Climate Hoax: Behind the Curtain of How Big Tech Greenwashes Impacts."

Why is this important?

Opposition to data center construction has been extraordinarily bipartisan. In 2025, project cancellations quadrupled as communities pushed back against these resource-intensive facilities, which have strained an aging grid and contributed to surging energy prices. When powered by fuels like gas and coal, data centers also spew massive amounts of air pollution. 

Still, it's challenging to argue we should abandon AI altogether. For starters, AI may be key to optimizing the electrical grid, providing more accurate warnings for life-threatening storms, boosting crop yields, and supporting better outcomes in medical care. 

Yet, as Joshi emphasized to The Guardian, transparency and accountability are crucial to securing these types of benefits. He called the tech industry's tactics "diversionary" and a form of greenwashing. 

"The false coupling of a big problem and a small solution serves as a distraction from the very preventable harms being done through unrestricted datacentre expansion," he said. 

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What's being done about this?

Both Microsoft and Google have invested in solar and nuclear in a bid to limit air pollution from their AI data centers and meet energy demand. These commitments are undoubtedly promising. 

Yet Joshi's analysis found zero examples where generative AI tools like Google's Gemini, Microsoft's Copilot, and OpenAI's ChatGPT resulted in "material, verifiable, and substantial levels of emissions reductions." Moving forward, Joshi said the discussion surrounding AI's climate benefits needs to be "brought back to reality." 

For its part, Microsoft declined The Guardian's request for comment. The International Energy Agency, whose report reviewed by leading tech companies provided many of the claims scrutinized in Joshi's analysis, did not respond to the publication's queries.  

A Google spokesperson said: "Our estimated emissions reductions are based on a robust substantiation process grounded in the best available science, and we have transparently shared the principles and methodology that guide it."

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