UN Secretary-General says tech sector is not sustainable, urges AI companies to focus on renewables
We’re currently in the middle of an AI tech race between countries and between so-called Big Tech companies — and it’s a race that’s increasingly putting strains on our water and energy supply.
During a speech at the United Nations’ headquarters in New York, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that AI could boost efficiency and innovation, but he lambasted it for being extremely energy-hungry and not sustainable. Guterres therefore called on tech companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon to power their data centres with 100 percent renewable energy by 2030.
“AI can boost efficiency, innovation, and resilience in energy systems. But it is also energy-hungry. A typical AI data centre eats-up as much electricity as 100,000 homes. The largest ones will soon use twenty times that. By 2030, data centres could consume as much electricity as all of Japan does today.
This is not sustainable – unless we make it so. And the technology sector must be out front.
Today I call on every major tech firm to power all data centres with 100% renewables by 2030. And – along with other industries – they must use water sustainably in cooling systems.
The future is being built in the cloud. It must be powered by the sun, the wind, and the promise of a better world.”
In the US, the power consumption from data centres is expected to account for almost half of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030 — and AI usage is seen as the driving force behind this. And President Donald Trump wants to power his country’s energy hungry AI data centres with dirty coal and other fossil fuels.
While some Big Tech companies have made promises to green their businesses — such as Google, who has promised to slash its greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 — it’s still hard to know just how much Big Tech’s data centres actually pollute. According to a recent analysis, the actual greenhouse gas emissions from data centres could be as much as 662 percent higher than what the companies themselves claim.
In the case of Google, their greenhouse gas emissions have actually increased by a whopping 51 percent since 2019. And the company recently reported a 27 percent increase in year-on-year electricity consumption. According to the company’s own 2025 sustainability report, this demand is largely being driven by a growth in data centre capacity required to power their artificial intelligence efforts.
Clearly, climate progress is being jeopardized due to this new AI tech race. It would be a real shame if we crashed our climate partly thanks to it, and it turned out that the fears of an AI model collapse were real, and the AI boom was just another tech bubble that burst.