The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA), in a report published in Geneva on September 2, 2026, found that digital companies are cutting emissions too slowly to meet global climate targets, even as climate reporting and renewable energy purchases have improved.
Why it matters: This is the fifth year ITU and WBA have run this assessment, and the direction is now clear rather than ambiguous: emissions from digital companies rose again in 2024, and the report singles out artificial intelligence as a specific reason why. As AI infrastructure expands rapidly worldwide, this report gives one of the first sector-wide, multi-year data sets showing what that expansion is actually costing in energy and emissions terms, rather than relying on individual companies’ own framing of their AI footprint.
Fast facts
- Report: Greening Digital Companies: Monitoring Emissions and Climate Commitments 2026, fifth edition
- Published by: ITU and the World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA)
- Scope: 200 digital companies globally, using 2024 reporting-year data
- Operational emissions: 301 million tonnes CO2 equivalent (Scope 1 and 2) — 0.8% of global energy-related emissions, up 1.2% from 2023
- Electricity use: 163 companies reported 494 terawatt-hours in 2024 — about 1.7% of global electricity consumption, with 54% concentrated in just 10 companies
- AI’s footprint: four major AI and cloud providers’ operational emissions reached up to 239% of their 2020 levels
- Contrast: 14 large telecom operators cut emissions by 11% over the same period
What the report actually measured
ITU and WBA built this report using data companies themselves disclosed for the 2024 reporting year, covering greenhouse gas emissions, energy use, renewable electricity sourcing, and climate targets. For the first time, this edition also assessed companies’ climate transition plans — not just whether they’d set a target, but whether they’d laid out a credible path to hit it.
Coverage of basic emissions reporting is fairly strong: 89% of the 200 companies reported direct emissions (Scope 1) and 81% reported emissions from purchased energy (Scope 2). Reporting drops sharply once the scope widens — only 47% reported Scope 3 emissions, the category covering a company’s full value chain, from suppliers to how customers ultimately use its products.
That gap matters more than it might sound. Among companies that did disclose Scope 3 data, those value-chain emissions made up 76% of their total carbon footprint — meaning most of a typical digital company’s real climate impact sits in a category fewer than half of them are even measuring.
AI’s emissions, in the report’s own numbers
The report describes AI as a “double-edged sword” for the sector’s climate trajectory. AI tools can cut emissions elsewhere — through energy optimization, better renewable-power forecasting, and efficiency gains in other industries — but building and running AI infrastructure carries its own direct environmental cost.
The contrast the report draws is specific: four major AI and cloud providers saw operational emissions climb to as much as 239% of their 2020 levels, while 14 large telecom operators cut emissions by 11% over that same four-year stretch. Doreen Bogdan-Martin, ITU Secretary-General, said digital technologies offer real potential for climate action, but that their rising energy demands and emissions “cannot be overlooked,” and that sustainability needs to be built into how these technologies are designed, powered, and scaled — not addressed after the fact.
Where corporate climate commitments fall short
Most large digital companies have set some kind of climate target: 151 of the 200 assessed, or 76%, submitted near-term reduction targets for their direct and purchased-energy emissions. Far fewer of those targets hold up under independent scrutiny — only 114 were validated against science-based frameworks, and of those, just 85 were assessed as on track based on actual progress so far.
The gap widens further at the planning stage. Only 81 companies, or 41%, had what the report calls a comprehensive climate transition plan — one with clear strategic ambition, an implementation approach, defined metrics and targets, and real governance behind it. Setting a target and having a credible plan to hit it turn out to be two different things for most of the sector.
Renewable electricity purchases tell a similar story of partial progress. Digital companies remain among the largest corporate buyers of renewable electricity globally, but only 25 of the 200 companies assessed reported sourcing 100% renewable electricity in 2024.
Where the emissions are actually coming from
Gerbrand Haverkamp, Executive Director of the World Benchmarking Alliance, pointed to suppliers as a specific place digital companies need to focus. He said the electronics sector — which supplies much of the hardware underpinning digital infrastructure — accounts for 53% of reported emissions across all three subsectors WBA tracked, underscoring how much of the sector’s footprint sits upstream, in manufacturing and supply chains, rather than in a company’s own offices or data centers.
What ITU and WBA are recommending next
The report lays out a specific set of priorities: strengthening climate reporting (particularly the weak Scope 3 numbers), reducing value-chain emissions, improving how companies actually implement their transition plans, and aligning AI and digital infrastructure growth with clean energy development rather than treating the two as separate problems.
Cosmas Luckyson Zavazava, Director of ITU’s Telecommunication Development Bureau, said the sector has the innovation, resources, and influence to help build a more sustainable digital future, but that realizing that potential means turning commitments into actual implementation — cutting emissions, strengthening collaboration across the sector, and making sure digital growth, including AI, advances alongside clean energy development rather than outrunning it.
ITU is pushing this work forward through its Expert Group on Telecommunication/ICT Indicators, which includes a sub-group building harmonized national-level indicators for tech-sector emissions and energy use, and through its broader Green Digital Action initiative, which calls for more transparency on energy use, emissions, and progress against science-based targets.
Zoom out
The tension this report documents — AI systems that can help cut emissions elsewhere while driving up a company’s own energy demand faster than almost anything else in its operations — is playing out well beyond the 200 companies in this study. As AI infrastructure buildouts accelerate globally, this report is one of the clearer sector-wide signals yet that voluntary climate commitments, on their own, aren’t keeping pace with what that buildout is costing in energy and emissions terms.
