Tech companies love to talk about how artificial intelligence can help solve climate change, lately, though, a new report calls out the hype. Turns out, a lot of these big promises lump traditional AI together with flashy new generative AI, making the tech sound like a climate hero when that’s just not the case. Experts call AI climate solutions greenwashing, and this kind of messaging distracts from the huge environmental cost of the enormous, power-hungry data centres that run these tools.

How Are Tech Companies Misrepresenting AI’s Environmental Impact?

Tech companies keep talking up AI as a climate hero, but most of their big green claims actually focus on older machine learning models, not the new generative AI, like those giant language and image generators, that are fueling the current data center boom. Generative models burn through a ton of energy and ramp up emissions, but you rarely hear about that in company statements.

Here’s what’s really going on:

• Companies blur the lines between traditional AI (stuff like prediction or data sorting) and generative AI when they talk about environmental wins. It sounds impressive, but it’s misleading.
• Out of all the corporate climate claims reviewed, only about a 26% pointed to peer-reviewed research. Over a 36% didn’t back up their statements at all.
• Early on, some reports claimed AI could cut global greenhouse gases by 5–10% by 2030. That sounded great, but those numbers came from consultancy reports, not solid, verified data.
• Data centers suck up about 1% of the world’s electricity. BloombergNEF thinks that figure could jump to 8.6% of all US electricity by 2035, which is a massive leap, and the true environmental cost is much bigger than most companies let on.

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Why Do Experts Call This Greenwashing?

Ketan Joshi, the report’s author, said the actions of the industry can be described as “diversionary” and can be compared to actions taken by the fossil fuel sector to distract people from their greenhouse gas emissions. By overstating the benefits of AI to the environment and increasing their energy-intensive data centers, tech companies can mislead people about the true impact of AI on the world.

Critics like Sasha Luccioni of Hugging Face argue that generative AI models like chatbots and video makers are particularly damaging to the environment, which is in contrast to older models of predictive AI that have the potential to mitigate the effects of global warming.

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What Are the Consequences of Misleading AI Climate Claims?

Experts call AI climate solutions greenwashing, and the report highlights the dangers of mixing various kinds of AI, as well as overstating the benefits of each, which can detract from the harm caused by the explosive, unregulated expansion of data centres. Without transparency in the reporting of the data and supporting evidence, the supposed role that AI can play in climate action is largely symbolic.

Technology companies must reconcile the environmental impact of their datacentres with their genuine AI climate benefits, as only then can AI truly have a substantive impact on reducing climate change, and not engage in greenwashing through unsubstantiated claims.

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