Green Web Foundation’s first State of the Fossil-Free Internet report documents a transparency gap at the heart of technology companies’ green energy claims.
29 April 2026 — Google, Amazon and Microsoft control two-thirds of the internet’s cloud infrastructure and have all made net-zero commitments. But according to a new report from us, none of them publicly disclose their energy use in a format that makes it possible to monitor or compare what types of energy they use in specific regions, and all three are burning more fossil fuels.
The State of the Fossil-Free Internet 2026: The Dirty Data Centre Edition is our first annual report on progress towards a fossil-free internet by 2030. It combines original Green Web Foundation data with more than 140 external sources to document how the expansion of fossil-fuelled data centres is putting that goal at risk, and who is responsible.
As part of the report, we have built a transparency scorecard rating what Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure each disclose about their fossil fuel use. On the most important data points, all three companies score very low or zero. In headlines, they celebrate renewable energy purchases. The raw figures for emissions are buried in reports.
“Microsoft says it matches its electricity use in Ireland to renewable energy 100%,” the report notes. “And yet we see smokestacks from gas-powered generators big enough to provide power for 100,000 people every day peering up from between their buildings. It doesn’t add up.”
The report documents the scale of what is being built. Meta’s Hyperion campus in Louisiana, still under construction at a cost of over $10 billion, will be supported by three new gas plants and could consume close to as much power as Los Angeles annually. Its 11km² site is about a fifth the size of Manhattan. At least 7,250 new data centre projects are planned worldwide, two-thirds of them in North America.
Communities living near these facilities face toxic emissions linked to higher rates of asthma, heart disease and cancer, rising electricity bills, and shrinking water supplies, with limited public transparency over the deals struck between operators and local governments. US greenhouse gas emissions rose 2.4% in 2025, with data centres cited as a leading cause. The carbon intensity of US data centres was 48% higher than the national average. Green Web Foundation’s transparency scorecard will be updated annually. We are calling on Google, Amazon and Microsoft to publish real-time, location-based energy use and emissions data, and for governments to make such disclosures mandatory.
A public briefing will be held online on Wednesday 27 May 2026 at 16:00 CET. You can register on Pretix:
