What is quiet quitting? 

The phrase “quiet quitting” was popularised in 2022 to describe employees doing only the bare minimum to keep their jobs. 

In much the same way, major technology firms seem to be taking the least demanding path on sustainability, maintaining just enough of their commitments to avoid investor or public backlash, while stepping back from their previous ambitions.

Earnings call transcripts show how stark the change has been. Mentions of environmental issues peaked in 2022, at the height of the Biden administration’s green agenda, before falling sharply. Since then, the rise of AI and Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement have compounded the retreat. 

Large tech enterprises, such as Microsoft and Google, have aligned themselves with the new US administration and heavily increased their AI investments. Both companies had promised to slash their carbon footprints, but instead disclosed significant increases in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in their most recent environmental reports.

The big tech arms race

Bloomberg’s analysis found that corporate references to climate and sustainability have dropped by more than half since 2022, a decline that coincides with the explosion of AI. The release of ChatGPT in November that year triggered a global AI race, as governments and corporations poured money into developing the most advanced AI systems.

According to the UN Conference on Trade and Development, the AI market is expected to quadruple to $4.8tn by 2033. Even as some analysts warn that AI may be overvalued, the big players show no sign of slowing down, determined to seize the prize of producing the fastest and most capable models.

But this rush comes at an environmental cost. Generative AI (GenAI) consumes vast amounts of electricity and water. A single ChatGPT query can use up to 10 times more energy than a standard Google search. 

A single ChatGPT query can use up to 10 times more energy than a standard Google search

That energy comes from datacentres, which are huge facilities filled with servers and computing equipment, that power these GenAI tools. While datacentres have existed for decades, the growth of AI has accelerated their construction and energy use to the point where scientists warn they could consume as much electricity as Japan by 2026.

AI is driving extraordinary innovation and investment, but it is also making corporate net-zero pledges harder, if not impossible, to achieve. Instead of abandoning their promises outright, companies are quietly shifting the goalposts, presenting their environmental strategies in softer language while pushing ahead with energy-intensive AI projects.

Google is a case in point. The company has pledged to achieve net-zero emissions by 2030 while simultaneously scaling up AI. Its 10th annual environmental report, published in June 2025, claimed a 12% reduction in datacentre energy emissions but acknowledged that overall GHG emissions had risen by 6.2%.

The non-profit advocacy group Kairos Fellowship, however, accused Google of reframing its commitments to obscure this reality. Its report, Google’s eco-failures, noted that between 2019 and 2024, net-zero targets were featured prominently in Google’s sustainability reports, always within the opening pages. 

By 2025, those references had been relegated to the appendix and rebranded as a “carbon reduction moonshot”. According to co-author Nicole Surgeman, this is how corporations move the goalposts without attracting attention: “I think they’re attempting to save face by subtly walking it back over a span of years, [and] they’re hoping that people will not notice that they used to have this goal by making it less prominent.”

Kairos also points out that Google’s emissions have risen by 121% since 2019. The organisation claims Google attempts to obfuscate this by buying carbon emission offsets, which is when companies compensate for their carbon footprint by funding projects that reduce or remove greenhouse gases elsewhere. 

Surgeman argues that this only obscures the truth: “What it doesn’t account for is that the real emissions that the’’re emitting are going up over the same period.” 

She and her colleagues linked this surge directly to AI, tracing it back to 2021 and the launch of LaMDA, the foundation for Google’s Gemini model, which drove rapid datacentre expansion. “The emissions are mostly from their datacentres and they’ve been building those at a very rapid pace to account for the power they need for their AI models,” she adds.

Google rejected the criticism, with a spokesperson insisting that its emissions are calculated under the widely used Greenhouse Gas Protocol and independently assured. 

But Franz Ressel, co-author and researcher on the report, says: “Google’s PR team can whip up evasive talking points…but it cannot hide from the truth: Google’s own third-party-assured data reveals that the corporation has utterly failed to decrease its emissions. Unfortunately, as we detail in our report, Google hides this data in the appendix of its environmental reports, cherry-picking PR-favourable data points to highlight instead.”

Computer Weekly reached out to Google for a response, but none was forthcoming at the time of publication.

The result, according to Kairos, is that Google will not be able to reach its net-zero goals by 2030 primarily due to its drive towards increasingly energy-hungry AI.

Yet despite this, it is claimed the company will not publicly admit this and is instead favouring an approach where the company quietly backs away from its sustainability aims and goals. 

Beyond AI

The cultural shift away from sustainability is not only about AI. Even before Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, Republican politicians had begun passing anti-ESG legislation.  Once back in office, Trump wasted no time, pulling the US back out of the Paris Climate Agreement and reportedly taking 145 actions in his first 100 days to weaken regulations on air, water and climate.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, alongside other billionaires, attended Trump’s inauguration, while Microsoft and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) each donated $1m to the inaugural fund.

So, has Big Tech’s embrace of the new Trump administration translated into a more relaxed stance on climate?

Mark Butcher, director of Posetiv Cloud, an advisory firm on sustainable practices, argues that “any large organisation that is close to the current US government regime and has benefited from Donald Trump coming into power is overtly rowing back their intent, their promises and their commitments, and reducing investment [in sustainable practices].”

Butcher believes many firms were never fully committed to sustainability in the first place, following the climate-friendly zeitgeist rather than conviction. “A very large number are just following the money,” he says. “They’re seeing an upside of getting huge revenues being very closely associated with Trump. As a result, they’re sidelining or starting to mask some of their [green] initiatives. It doesn’t mean that those initiatives have stopped. It just means that they’ve actually pushed them into the background, and they’re not shouting about them as much.”

He notes this trend is primarily US-driven. Companies in Europe and Asia-Pacific, spurred by initiatives such as the European Green Deal, have doubled down on sustainability. The gap highlights how the political climate can directly shape corporate environmental behaviour.

Any executive who is not building sustainability into their risk planning and their forward-looking decisions into the way they run their business is going to be increasing their risks

Beyond ideology, there are also practical challenges. The Uptime Institute, which sets global standards for datacentre operations, has warned that the sector will struggle to meet its sustainability goals as compute demands surge. In its 15th annual survey, the Uptime Institute found that the datacentre sector’s collection of sustainability data has stagnated or even declined, suggesting growing ambivalence.

Jay Dietrich, Uptime’s research director of sustainability, says this is less about disinterest and more about capacity: “When you want to get all this data together, it’s a two-to-three-year effort that requires cooperation from all these different organisations within the enterprise to deliver the data. It’s a complicated system for smaller operators, as it’s a big resource commitment.” 

He argues that regulation and incentives are essential to bridge the gap between ambition and reality: “The real place that this starts to get traction is when the business sees how collecting and and using this data brings business value.”

Others remain more hopeful. David Picton, senior vice-president of ESG at EcoOnline, insists sustainability can drive growth: “[Sustainability] can drive cost savings, energy efficiencies, innovative processes, waste reduction and all of that, of course, goes straight to the bottom line.”

Surveys support that claim. PwC reported in 2025 that nearly 5,000 CEOs believed sustainability investments were six times more likely to increase revenue. Morgan Stanley also published a report that found more than half of executives had seen operations impacted by climate-related events over the past year.

“If you look at recent events, like the Texas floods, the monsoons in India, heat waves here in the UK, a lot of this data in the sustainability reporting actually links to the way you prepare for crisis, and the way you plan your response to keep your workers safe and avoid disruptions to operations,” says Picton.

He argues that businesses must stop framing sustainability purely as a moral imperative and start talking about it as sound economics and added business value: “It’s not about doing a nice thing, because that rarely sticks in business. What does stick is a good business case. So, I think there’s a lot more talk about the good business cases for sustainability. Any executive who is not building sustainability into their risk planning and their forward-looking decisions into the way they run their business is going to be increasing their risks.”

Quiet quitting or strategic retreat?

The rise of AI, combined with shifting US politics, has created the conditions for a quiet retreat from sustainability. Yet surveys still show strong corporate recognition of its importance. A 2025 survey by Kearney found that two-thirds of CFOs now view sustainability as a value driver rather than a cost, with 92% planning to increase investment.

Whether these pledges translate into genuine action or amount to carefully packaged PR remains to be seen.