Tyler Norris: The 100 Most Influential Climate Leaders of 2025

This strategy has worked to this day. Last year, even as the company’s energy usage grew with its rising AI footprint, Google’s data-center energy emissions fell—the result of those continued clean-energy purchases. The company’s carbon emissions grew more than 50% from 2019 to 2024, though that growth came largely from its suppliers and end users rather than its own operations.

And alongside rising energy demand, the AI boom has created another opportunity to innovate. With just a quick glance, it’s easy to pick out Google’s fingerprints on a slew of the most promising clean-technology developments of the past year. In May, the company signed an agreement to buy fusion power from Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), a major boon not just for CFS but also for the nascent energy source. That month, Google also won approval in Nevada to supply a data center with geothermal power provided by Fervo Energy. And, in August, the company entered a deal to bring electricity to the grid from Kairos Power’s small modular reactors, a new form of nuclear technology. 

“We can’t solve the energy challenges of this century with the technologies from last century,” says Michael Terrell, head of advanced energy at Google and a member of the 2025 TIME100 Climate list. “We need to have a broader set of solutions, and that’s something that we’re committed to pioneering.”

Google, with its big balance sheet and expert staffing, can make tackling the coming electricity crunch look easy, but it will be anything but. For one, only some of the big tech companies have doubled down on commitments to zero-carbon electricity. Others have instead embraced natural gas as a quick fix. And there are hundreds of smaller companies, less vulnerable to public scrutiny, that aren’t thinking about climate at all.

Even still, creating the right technology is only a small part of a much bigger puzzle. Market structures need to be redesigned to incentivize new technologies and approaches to take off, requiring the participation of regulators and politicians. A wider set of corporate energy buyers need to prioritize cleaner energy­—even if climate isn’t as much of a public topic as it was just a few years ago. And, importantly, electric utilities need to buy in—a tall order considering they make their money by building new infrastructure, including and especially fossil-­fuel infrastructure. While many have shown interest in innovative solutions to slow demand, utilities are by and large still pushing to build new power plants. 

“It’s going to be hard, like trying to turn an aircraft carrier around,” says Norris. “But unless there is a concerted effort to choose another direction, there will very likely be a massive expansion of new fossil-fuel capacity in the U.S. and elsewhere.”