Google and Amazon: A Power Consumption Race
July 17, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
I did not want to read about a topic with which I was familiar. But I said to myself, “Hey, let’s do the confirmation bias drill.” I sat down, picked up my environmentally harmful hard copy of a Web document, and worked through “Google’s Exponential Path to Climate-Wrecking Digital Bloat.” My instinct was spot on: Nothing I did not know. I find it interesting that some obvious business practices catch some folks with a surprise moment.
Thanks, MidJourney. Good enough. I just gave up on the prompt square dance.
The write up says:
The company’s total electricity consumption jumped from 31 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2024 to 43 TWh in 2025. This is very easily the biggest increase in their electricity consumption ever, and it puts them way ahead of Microsoft. It is almost certainly a reflection of the obscene energy hunger of their ever-expanding bloated generative AI systems, and a vindication of the warnings we’ve been raising for several years now.
Big whoop. Google is into excess. Let me offer a human-powered example. Here’s a Google “problem”: What color blue generates the most clicks? How does a dinobaby like me solve the problem? Easy. I dismiss the question, pointing out that the Greeks did not have a word for blue; therefore, I am out of the meeting.
But the Google way is to allow three or more wizards to solve the problem. A click across billions of people allows a team leader to nail that incentive bonus. The engineers apply their efforts to a problem for which ancient Greece did not have a word. Test are designed, launched, and analyzed. Hooray, a specific color produces more clicks. Winner.
Is a company that applies $500,000 per year engineers to figuring out a color going to worry about an electric bill? If you get my drift, Google is essentially not interested in really trivial questions like brown outs that affect non-Googley people.
The write up moves forward with an earnestness this dinobaby admires. The idea is that the data demonstrate that power suckers like the BAITs (big AI tech companies) have to demonstrate their morality. Yeah, good luck with that.
Here’s a graph from the article that illustrates what some of the BAIT power consumption looks like:
Okay, bad Google. Is Google regulated in some way to prevent this type of power consumption? Will the current crop of regulators outside the US take action? Will US officials step in? Will power generation companies stop signing contracts with the Google? If you answered, “yes” to any of these questions, you need to look for more information about Google’s context.
The article includes a couple of Googley smarm outputs about its power consumption. The author of the article makes this point:
The path to ‘achieving their climate ambitions’ is not linear. It is looking more like an exponential, going in the exact wrong direction.
I agree, but I wish to point out that the statement for the Google does not compute. If anything, the author of the article is making it clear that the author is not Googley and, therefore, unlikely to be hired by Alphabet or any of its subsidiaries. Here’s an example of a Google factoid about the energy cost per query interpreted by the author of the cited paper:
Google’s key tactic has been hyper-focusing on the energy consumption of a single, simple query to a chatbot, and highlighting how that has decreased over time, to mask how their absolute energy consumption has completely flipped out beyond belief.
Gee, does one expect Google to argue within the frame of a critic? That’s not going to happen.
The cited article also brings up another issue unlikely to wrinkle Googzilla’s forehead: Water for cooling. Also, Google just selects data to demonstrate its environmental actions.
Several observations strike me as warranted:
- Carping about what Google does to operate may not result in meaningful change. People forget that users (almost 4 billion of them) depend on Google. Does anyone expect Google to turn away users to save power, water, snail darters, or dolphins?
- Google has normalized its corporate behavior. Changing that is not something a chart about power is going to change. What causes change is an advertiser revolt or users abandoning its online services. That’s a friendly tip for those who want Google to alter its standard operating procedure: It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission.
- In the US, no one cares because power and water are taken for granted. Only when the lights go out and the taps hiss and emit brown sludge will people take action.
Net net: Now you know why I don’t read too many articles about Google’s environmental actions.
Stephen E Arnold, July 17, 2026
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