While Amazon’s artificial intelligence buildout drives its vast carbon emissions to new heights, Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder and executive chairman, is using his environmental charity to promote AI as a solution to the climate crisis.
Last fall, the Bezos Earth Fund, founded in 2020 and chaired by Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez, began describing one of its missions as “harnessing AI to help save the planet.” This new focus on AI came after years in which the fund emphasized decarbonization, conservation, and other traditional climate initiatives.
“At the Bezos Earth Fund, we believe that on balance, AI is going to be a tool and a force for good and a tool and a force for saving the planet,” said Amen Ra Mashariki, the Bezos Earth Fund’s AI director, during a TED Talk session at the New York Climate Summit in September. “AI, on balance, will have a positive impact on the planet,” he added.
However, by Amazon’s own admission, its massive spending on data center construction and AI infrastructure operations is a leading cause of its rising emissions. In 2024, Amazon’s self-reported carbon emissions grew by 6% year-over-year, “primarily from data center construction and fuel consumption by third-party delivery service providers.” Amazon’s 68.25 million metric tons of carbon emissions in 2024 were more than the combined fossil-fuel emissions of Norway and Finland that year.
The company, which said it relies on AI in “virtually every corner” of its operations, also disclosed a 33% increase in emissions since 2019, the year that Amazon announced its Climate Pledge to achieve net-zero emissions by 2040.
Amazon’s emissions are likely to grow. Last month, the company announced that it would spend $200 billion this year, much of that on data centers, computing infrastructure, and other AI-related investments. While Amazon was late to the AI boom that began in 2022, a Business Insider report estimated that its data centers are on pace to consume the most electricity in the industry.
The Bezos Earth Fund did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“We haven’t gotten there yet”
Data centers, particularly those used to train and power generative AI models, play a clear role in heating the planet. They consume massive amounts of electricity, often relying on gas- and coal-fired plants to meet their power needs.
The Energy Information Administration reported this month that U.S. electricity generation hit a record high in 2025 for the second year in a row, with the economic sector that includes data centers accounting for the largest increase in demand.
A November study by Cornell researchers looking to measure the environmental impact of the AI boom found that “the current rate of AI growth would annually put 24 to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere [by 2030], the emissions equivalent of adding 5 to 10 million cars to U.S. roadways. It would also drain 731 to 1,125 million cubic meters of water per year — equal to the annual household water usage of 6 to 10 million Americans.”
However, according to the Bezos Earth Fund, AI could be humanity’s best hope for curbing climate change, even though the technology has never been used to meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“We really want to get to a place where, in climate and nature, AI is actually offering solutions, creative solutions that even the world’s greatest experts find counterintuitive but are actually really powerful,” Mashariki, the Bezos Earth Fund’s AI chief, said in his September talk. “We haven’t gotten there yet. And that’s where we should be going.”
The comments came after Bezos chose longtime Amazon executive Tom Taylor to lead his climate fund’s day-to-day operations. While Taylor, who replaced economist and environmental policy expert Andrew Steer, does not appear to have experience in environmental science or related fields, his work history does include overseeing Amazon’s AI products.
And under his tenure, the Bezos Earth Fund has focused its messaging on using AI “as a force for good,” providing $31.2 million in grants as part of its “AI for Climate and Nature Grand Challenge.” Among the recipients were projects to develop a chatbot for dairy farmers, an AI emulator for carbon-removal simulations, and an open-source AI hub “to fast-track” lab-grown meat innovation.
The fund has also given $3.2 million to a project to help develop a standardized nuclear reactor design. “Expanding nuclear power can deliver energy abundance — clean, reliable, around-the-clock electricity that supports prosperity and good jobs — while also helping meet climate goals in a small land footprint,” Taylor said in a January statement announcing the Bezos Earth Fund’s “philanthropic commitment… to accelerate the responsible deployment of nuclear energy.”
Expanding nuclear power is also a top priority for AI companies, including Amazon, which last year said it had invested more than $1 billion in nuclear energy projects and technologies to meet the ever-growing power demands of its data centers.
Jeff Bezos, climate “visionary”
In September 2019, one day before a planned walkout by 1,500 Amazon employees over environmental concerns, Bezos vowed that the company would reach carbon neutrality by 2040. “We’re done being in the middle of the herd on this issue — we’ve decided to use our size and scale to make a difference,” he said in a statement announcing the Amazon Climate Pledge. “If a company with as much physical infrastructure as Amazon — which delivers more than 10 billion items a year — can meet the Paris Agreement 10 years early, then any company can.”
Bezos founded the Bezos Earth Fund in 2020 with a $10 billion commitment to provide grants “to address climate and nature within the current decade,” per the philanthropy’s website. “Anybody today who is not acknowledging that climate change is real – that we humans are affecting the planet in a very significant and dangerous way – those people are not being reasonable,” he said in 2020.
But in the years since, Amazon has loosened some of its climate goals. In 2023, the company quietly eliminated its pledge to reach net-zero carbon emissions on 50% of its shipments by 2030. “It no longer made sense to have a separate and more narrow Shipment Zero goal that applied to only one part of our business,” Amazon said after a reporter noticed the change to the company’s climate pledge. Shipment Zero was the company’s first-ever climate commitment.
After receiving an $18 million grant from Bezos’ fund, Science Based Targets, an initiative that tracks whether companies’ emissions are aligned with the Paris Agreement, announced it would allow businesses to apply voluntary carbon market offsets toward their emissions-reduction goals. So, for every metric ton of carbon emitted by Amazon’s data centers or shipping business, it could purchase a “credit” from an environmental organization, which, in turn, would claim to capture an equivalent amount of carbon by filtering it from the atmosphere, planting and preserving forests, or creating clean energy.
In practice, the carbon market often provides companies with an easy way to sell themselves as environmentally friendly to the public and regulators while continuing to increase their emissions. The voluntary and unregulated market, which the oil and gas industry has embraced, does little to reduce global warming, according to a 2023 report from Corporate Accountability and The Guardian. It found that the vast majority of projects selling carbon credits likely overstated their greenhouse gas reductions. In many cases, renewable energy projects that sell credits on the carbon market would have happened without a corporate buyer.
Meanwhile, some of Amazon’s own employees have said the company has not lived up to its climate pledge. “Amazon is getting worse, not better, on climate,” wrote the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice group in a May 2023 article, which referenced a report that Amazon had severely minimized its manufacturing and disposal-related emissions by only counting those generated by its self-branded products. “This means that even if Amazon met the Climate Pledge, it likely wouldn’t be a true net-zero emissions company, because it refuses to take accountability for the numerous other ways it impacts our environment,” the workers wrote. Later that month, more than 1,000 corporate Amazon employees staged a walkout, citing a lack of trust in leadership and the company’s “climbing” emissions, among other concerns.
Nevertheless, Conservation International also awarded Bezos its Global Visionary Award at a glitzy 2024 environmental gala attended by Harrison Ford and other stars.
As Bezos has used Amazon’s pledge and his climate fund to bolster his standing as an environmentalist, The Washington Post, which he purchased for $250 million in 2013, has become a purveyor of climate-change doubt. The paper’s editorial board questioned whether the “modest benefits of regulating greenhouse gases outweigh the considerable economic costs” in a February piece praising Trump for neutering the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate some pollutants. It also published an op-ed that month from climate skeptic Bjørn Lomborg, who downplayed climate change as “far from the apocalyptic catastrophe that makes headlines.”
That same month, Bezos opted to lay off 14 members of The Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning climate team, leaving a skeleton crew of five remaining reporters, according to the Climate Colored Goggles newsletter.
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