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Visitors stand next to a model of the Blue Spear land-to-sea missile system, developed by Proteus Advanced Systems Pte. Ltd., a joint venture company of Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd. (IAI) and ST Engineering Land Systems Ltd., at the Singapore Airshow held at the Changi Exhibition Centre in Singapore, on Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2022. [SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images]
History is filled with examples of corporations fueling war machines and global colonisation. IBM supplied technology used in Nazi death camps; shipping and trading companies played central roles in the Transatlantic trafficking of Africans; and multinational firms helped bankroll South Africa’s apartheid regime. The companies that once profited from South Africa’s pass laws, today empower Israel’s biometric checkpoints. Silicon Valley giants are repeating that history by providing the digital tools and propaganda that enable and whitewash Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The collaboration between Israel and Silicon Valley goes far beyond hardware and algorithms, encompassing narrative control. According to Drop Site News, Google signed a six-month, $45 million contract with the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to promote government disinformation and downplay the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Signed in late June, the agreement made Google a “key entity” in Netanyahu’s PR strategy.
The PR campaign was launched in response to international outrage after Israel violated the ceasefire on 2 March and blocked food, medicine, and fuel from entering Gaza. The Google contract was part of Israel’s digital disinformation effort claiming “there is no hunger” in Gaza. In other words, while Palestinian babies were starving to death, Google was fattening its checkbook, serving as Netanyahu’s pernicious digital PR machine to obscure the crime.
In 2021, Microsoft (MS) signed a $133 million contract that made the Israeli military its second-largest defence customer after the United States, describing the Israeli army as a “top priority” client. The deal includes more than 600 separate Azure subscriptions linked to military units such as Mamram, its central tech hub, and Unit 8200, its elite cyber-intelligence wing.
According to the Associated Press, MS’s support team fielded 130 direct requests from the military in the first ten months of the Gaza genocide. Its data centers outside Tel Aviv store more than 13.6 petabytes of data, or 350 times the size of the Library of Congress. At least nine MS employees, including some ex-unit 8200 Israeli officers, coordinated MS AI genocide with the Israeli army.
MS centers supplied raw data for Israel’s AI kill lists. Since 2021, these facilities were used to deploy “Gospel” and “Lavender,” algorithms that ranked Palestinians by the likelihood of being militants. Lavender, for example, assigns scores from 0 to 100 based on criteria as family history, friends or intercepted phone calls and messages.
Known as “AI hallucination,” these systems often generate information that appears convincing but is, in fact, fabricated. “Hallucinating” AI models can extrapolate from incomplete or misleading inputs, such as intercepted phone data, mistranslated language, ambiguous signals, or distorted realities, and combine them with unscientific assumptions about family history to produce what appear to be credible “kill” targets.
AI doesn’t make war cleaner. It is a resourceful utility to murder, efficiently. Inside the tech companies, workers who did not sign to murder, protested. In response, MS fired the staff who organised a vigil for Palestinian refugees. One, Hossam Nasr, leading the campaign: No Azure for Apartheid, said, “cloud and AI are the bombs and bullets of the 21st century.” The digital targeting has taken war to a new barbaric level fusing US corporate power and Israeli malevolent occupation.
Google is also deeply enmeshed in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion joint venture with Amazon to supply Israel’s government and military with cloud computing, artificial intelligence services, and data centers. This is not an abstract “infrastructure;” cloud storage and AI have become the backbone of modern warfare, powering surveillance systems, analysing targeting data, and sustaining Israel’s military operations from the “River to the Sea.”
Like MS, when workers raised alarms and protested against the Nimbus contract, instead of engaging the employees, Google summoned the police and fired 28 of its staff. A company engineer described Google’s contract to build a “sovereign cloud” exclusively for the Israeli government whereby they can use it with no regards to international law.
Instead of investigating ways to ensure, AI products are not used to murder and starve children, AI companies formalised the ethical violations. OpenAI, for instance, changed its policies to allow military use of its models. Google removed language that barred using AI to weapons or surveillance. Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, a Zionist by all means, urged Silicon Valley to build the “drone swarms and robots that will dominate the coming battlefield.”
Over a year ago, Col. Racheli Dembinsky, head of the army’s computing unit, stood before a giant screen displaying the logos of Israeli genocide partners: Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Palantir, and Amazon Web Services. She hailed the “very significant operational effectiveness” of this partnership in the Gaza genocide.
The challenge is whether the world will hold accountable not only the state dropping the bombs but also the companies engineering the algorithms to deliver murder and the PR machines that conceal it. Israel is not the only party guilty of genocide; but the corporations reaping blood profit from synthesising and enabling its war crimes.
Big Tech does more than make war “efficient.” It creates the digital fog that enables mainstream media to wash massacres into sanitised narratives. Algorithms are weaponised not just on the battlefield, but across social media. In a clear example of this insidious subversion of the truth, META hired an ex-Israeli embassy staff as “Israel & the Jewish Diaspora policy chief,” Jordana Cutler, who spoke proudly before the Jewish National Fund of her role to silence pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli activities across META’s platforms.
META, owner of the major social media outlets: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Threads … etc., is one of Netanyahu’s new weapons, suppressing images of Israeli atrocities while amplifying Zionist disinformation. In doing so, Big Tech firms are playing a dual role in the architecture of the Israeli genocide against Palestinians: facilitating its execution on the ground, and whitewashing it in the media.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAKeir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
The government has signed vast deals with gas-loving, Trump-donating AI giants.
When U.S. President Donald Trump landed for what he called the “exquisite honour” of an unprecedented second state visit to the UK this September, he brought along a retinue of his favourite Silicon Valley tech bosses for dinner with King Charles.
Among the guests seated in the gold-flecked banquet hall of Windsor Castle: Jensen Huang, CEO of the artificial intelligence (AI) chip-manufacturer Nvidia, which has recently skyrocketed into the position of the world’s largest public company, and Sam Altman, founder and CEO of ChatGPT creator OpenAI. Recently, these two tech CEOs seem to have earned a direct line to President Trump and, unsurprisingly, the bedrock of that influence appears to be money – earlier this year, Nvidia and Altman both donated $1 million (£750,000) to Trump’s inauguration ceremony.
When they landed in London, they quickly applied their skills of political influence to Labour.
Altman and Huang’s visit to the UK accompanied the signing of Trump and Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s £150 billion “U.S.-UK Technology Prosperity Deal”, an agreement which includes £31 billion in investments from American tech companies to construct fleets of gargantuan “hyperscaler” AI-ready data centres across Britain.
Stargate UK, a massive AI infrastructure project from OpenAI, Nvidia, and UK AI startup Nscale, is only one of several huge new initiatives introduced via the deal.
On the first day of the big visit, Nvidia threw a press conference to celebrate its pledge to invest a further £2 billion in UK AI.
“This is a historic day,” Starmer rhapsodised about the Nvidia investment while standing next to Huang, lit by the glow of a towering Nvidia logo.
Huang handed Starmer a framed golden Nvidia supercomputer as a gift, embossed with an inscription which Huang asked the prime minister to share.
“This is the UK’s age of AI,” Starmer read out to rising cheers in the audience. “A new industrial revolution begins!”
One glaring omission from Starmer and Huang’s “revolution”? Any mention of how the UK will power an explosion of water and energy-voracious AI data centres – the vast warehouses of supercomputers needed to run the likes of ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini – without completely upending the UK’s net zero commitments.
Instead, on the same day, Huang declared Nvidia’s plans to power its UK AI with fossil fuels.
“Sustainable power like nuclear and wind and of course all of that solar is all going to contribute, but I’m also hoping that gas turbines can also contribute,” he told The Times.
Starmer has claimed that home-grown clean energy is “in the DNA” of his government, yet Labour has so far said little about Nvidia’s plans for fossil fuel-powered AI in Britain – or how it intends to hit its net zero targets while charging headlong into this big tech bonanza.
Too Much, Too Quickly
Labour has already been widely accused of growing too close to U.S. big tech companies.
In recent months, the government has signed wide-ranging deals with seven Trump-supporting U.S. tech giants – Nvidia, OpenAI, Instagram and Facebook creator Meta, software company Microsoft, online retail behemoth Amazon, search engine pioneer Google, and enigmatic “spy tech” company Palantir.
Together, these tech firms have donated a combined $7.5 million (£5.6 million) to President Trump, a figure that doesn’t count the unspecified amounts Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Palantir reportedly gave for the construction of Trump’s new White House ballroom.
The Trump administration has pursued an anti-immigrant, anti-democratic, pro-fossil fuel agenda, which has included an eight-fold increase in weapons expenditure for Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers carrying out deadly immigration raids across the country, and over $1 trillion (£760 billion) in defence spending, largely for weapons, shipbuilding, and military aircraft.
Trump has so far sent National Guard troops into five U.S. cities and cut nearly $60 billion (£45 billion) in aid funding worldwide.
Labour has already struck deals that would see Trump’s big tech allies train the UK workforce in AI, collaborate with the British military, house the UK’s classified information, and “modernise” the NHS. These deals have prompted widespread concerns about their lack of transparency and the threats they pose to UK data security.
Now, further concern is growing that Labour is encouraging American AI companies to run roughshod over the UK’s renewable energy transition.
“Starmer’s investment deals with U.S. big tech threaten to give them priority access to Britain’s resources – be they energy, water, or personal data – rather than using these resources to meet public need. They will drive a coach and horses through our climate commitments,” Nick Dearden, director of campaign group Global Justice Now, told DeSmog.
That threat revolves around the government’s efforts to aggressively woo U.S. big tech to ramp up multi-billion pound AI data centre investments at its designated AI “Growth Zones”.
To date, several big tech firms have heeded the call. In the past few months, Microsoft has invested £22 billion, Google’s parent company Alphabet has pledged £5 billion, and Amazon – the biggest owner of data centres in the world – has promised £8 billion for UK AI development.
Oliver Hayes, head of policy at campaign organisation Global Action Plan, agrees with Dearden’s concerns. “By striking deals with U.S. tech companies that are gung-ho about gas-fired data centres, ministers are opening yet more doors for lobbyists, exposing bill-payers to greater pain, and jeopardising UK climate targets,” he told DeSmog.
Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have all already watered down or wholly abandoned their sustainability pledges in the last year due to the surging energy demands of their AI businesses.
OpenAI hasn’t even created one. This summer, the firm hired as its energy chief a former Trump-administration natural gas evangelist who promoted exports of American liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“One way of looking at AI is that its main use is as a vehicle to give the fossil fuel industry one last reason to expand,” wrote American environmentalist Bill McKibben in response to the hire.
Meanwhile, many of the people running these tech giants have veered into outright climate science denial.
Microsoft’s Bill Gates made headlines last week for making what he called a “strategic pivot” on climate change, claiming that it “will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future”.
His words contradict the position of hundreds of leading climate scientists across the world, who when surveyed by The Guardian said they expect that the earth will warm by at least 2.5C by the end of the century, which the UN’s climate agency has reported would lead to “catastrophic climate breakdown”.
Trump’s Tech Bros vs. Climate Change
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is not the only American tech boss with a proclivity for powering data centres with natural gas. Nearly all of the companies partnering with Labour have already embraced it.
Fossil gas as an AI energy “solution” is an import from Trump’s U.S. – the world’s top producer of liquefied natural gas. In July, Trump lauded the idea of powering data centres using fossil fuels while flanked by oil and gas executives.
A growing cadre of U.S. tech giants – including OpenAI, Oracle, Meta, xAI, and Microsoft – are installing gas turbine generators at their data centre sites in the U.S. and Ireland to provide energy to their supercomputer complexes. Amazon previously applied to build one, though eventually withdrew its plans. At the end of October, Google joined the list, announcing its investment in a gas plant with carbon capture for its data centres in the U.S. Midwest.
And many big tech companies are not shy about claiming that these projects are just the beginning.
Microsoft’s vice president for energy, Google’s chief investment officer, OpenAI’s Altman, Amazon’s vice president for global data centres, and Nvidia’s senior director of corporate sustainability have all publicly supported the idea of their companies relying on natural gas as an energy source for AI data centres.
Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and others at Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration. Credit: WSJ / YouTube
Now, several of these tech giants have set their sights on powering the UK AI boom with gas.
In a June meeting of the government’s newly formed AI Energy Council, which includes Google, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft, Labour ministers were pressured to consider that “temporary on-site generation, including natural gas fuel cells” could be an “interim measure” to avoid delays in connecting data centres to the UK’s notoriously backlogged energy grid.
The Tony Blair Institute, a think tank with a strong influence on Starmer’s government and deep ties to Trump-supporting American billionaire tech mogulLarry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, has added its voice to this chorus. The institute argued in a report published in July that dedicated gas power sources will be needed to provide reliable energy to UK data centres as a “bridging measure” to give time for the country’s renewable energy networks to develop.
Campaigners are quick to point out that powering data centres with gas would decimate the UK’s climate targets.
“Off-grid gas plants are a climate catastrophe which could lead to hundreds of millions of tonnes of additional carbon emissions from the tech sector. They would delay the phase out of fossil gas in Europe when we need to speed up the transition to renewable energy,” Jill McCardle of renewable energy campaign group Beyond Fossil Fuels told DeSmog.
This fact doesn’t seem to have deterred the big tech elite.
Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Earth Fund, Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt, and Altman have all said, in one way or another, that the AI boom will be worth its skyrocketing emissions because artificial intelligence will help to solve the climate crisis.
“I don’t want to say this because climate change is so serious and so hard of a problem,” Altman said in a 2023 interview, “but I think once we have a really powerful super intelligence, addressing climate change will not be particularly difficult for a system like that.”
Schmidt has argued that pursuing artificial general intelligence (AGI) – a supercomputer as smart or smarter than a human – is the best way to solve the climate crisis, because “we are never going to meet our climate goals anyway”.
Bill Gates told journalists last year that “data centres are, in the most extreme case, a 6 percent addition [to global energy needs] but probably only 2 percent to 2.5 percent. The question is, will AI accelerate a more than 6 percent reduction? And the answer is: certainly.”
Critics say – nonsense.
“The fact is that the climate crisis is not primarily a technological problem: we have most if not all of the tech we need to fix it,” Adam Becker, science journalist and author of More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, told DeSmog.
“Tech oligarchs think that they can burn fossil fuels with impunity and clean it up later with a magic wand given to them by a machine god. But that isn’t going to happen. The reality is that we need to save ourselves from the machinations of these cruelly myopic billionaires.”
Starmer’s Silence
Will Labour regulate the climate-destroying impulses of these tech behemoths?
“This AI frenzy needs to be regulated or big tech will burn dirty fossil fuels to power it,” McCardle warned DeSmog.
Hayes of Global Action Plan added: “Ministers should immediately and unequivocally announce that data centres will not be permitted to connect to the gas grid. Silicon Valley has money to burn, so if they want to put enormous demands on the UK’s energy system, they should pay for new renewables to supply it.”
However, Labour ministers haven’t yet put the kibosh on gas-powered AI.
During the president’s state visit in September, Starmer and Trump – whose administration has reversed American climate policy so dramatically that some experts are now calling the U.S. a “petrostate” – held a press conference for the Technology Prosperity Deal.
With the camera rolling, Trump addressed Nvidia’s gas-embracing CEO directly.
“AI is taking over the world. You’re taking over the world, Jensen [Huang]. I don’t know what you’re doing here. All I can say is we both hope you’re right.”
Through the whole exchange, Starmer sat with folded hands next to the American president, chuckling.
Labour’s Tech Courtships: A Primer
Microsoft
Microsoft, which has donated $750,000 (£560,000) to Trump and recently rolled back its “moonshot” sustainabilitygoals amid a surge in its AI emissions, already operates several data centres in the UK and currently has plans to build a £106 million AI-ready hyperscaler data centre in Leeds.
During Trump’s state visit, and as part of the new U.S.-UK Technology Prosperity Deal, Microsoft announced its plans to invest $30 billion (£22.5 billion) to “power [the UK’s] AI future”.
Microsoft’s links with Labour go deeper than this huge infusion of Trump-affiliated cash. It has partnered with Labour on a number of projects, including joining Amazon in training millions of workers in AI skills, and signing a deal to provide Microsoft’s AI software at a discount to the UK public sector.
Though the company still pays lip service to its commitment to sustainably-powered AI, it is working with fossil fuel companies – selling its AI services to fossil fuel companies including ExxonMobil and Chevron – and actively embracing fossil fuel-based energy options.
As for gas-powered AI, Microsoft’s Vice President of Energy, Bob Hollis, told CNBC in March that powering more data centres with natural gas paired with carbon capture was “not off the table”.
Microsoft already operates a data centre campus powered by off-grid gas generators in Ireland, and had been slated to build a data centre next to a coal plant in the U.S. state of Wisconsin until local opposition stopped the project.
Google
Labour’s deal-making with Google, which gave $1 million (£750,000) to Trump’s inauguration and quietly deleted all sustainability targets from its website in September, has been extensive.
Labour has granted Google a £400 million defence contract to use its cloud services for “classified information sharing”, has signed a partnership with the firm to help the government – including the NHS and local councils – to “modernise”, alongside an agreement for the company to help “upskill” British workers with AI.
Google’s parent company Alphabet – which opened a £735 million data centre in Hertfordshire with Chancellor Rachel Reeves earlier this year – announced a £5 billion investment in UK-based AI research and infrastructure in September to coincide with Trump’s visit.
Google – whose carbon emissions soared by nearly 50 percent between 2019 and 2024 – claims it has signed a deal with Shell to supply “95 percent carbon-free energy” for its UK investments. However, this claim is called into question by the company’s planned hyperscaler data centre in Essex, which will belch out 570,000 tonnes of CO2 each year.
The company has also begun advocating for the use of fossil fuels to meet data centre energy demands.
In August, Google’s Chief Investment Officer Ruth Porat praised a speech by the U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in which he pushed to expand the use of fossil fuels for powering data centers. Porat called Burgum’s comments “fantastic” – “[b]ecause I think it is very clear that to realise the potential of AI, you have to have the power to deliver it.”
A Google policy brief has also detailed the company’s intention to pursue “accelerating innovation and investment in affordable, reliable, and secure energy technologies, including geothermal, advanced nuclear, and natural gas generation with carbon capture”.
Meta
Meta, which donated $1 million (£750,000) to Trump’s inauguration fund, is currently building “Hyperion”, three massive gas-powered data centres in Louisiana larger than the size of Manhattan. The firm is also pursuing a “titan cluster” of data centres in Ohio dubbed “Prometheus”, powered by its own gas plant.
It is also currently working on a $1 million (£750,000) initiative with Labour to provide “government-owned” AI tools for “high-security use cases like language translation for national security” and “speeding up the approvals process for house building”.
At the end of January, former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who was Meta’s president of global affairs at the time, hosted a dinner with former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair where tech entrepreneurs met with government investment ministers.
It is unknown whether Meta currently has plans to invest in UK data centres.
Palantir
Palantir, a mysterious spy tech company that builds databases of personal information, is run by a Trump-supporting climate science denier. However, that hasn’t stopped Labour from working with the firm.
In September, the government announced a £1.5 billion “strategic partnership” to “boost military AI and innovation”, in which Palantir will collaborate with the UK military to “develop AI-powered capabilities already tested in Ukraine to speed up decision making, military planning and targeting.”
The partnership comes on top of Palantir’s ongoing five-year £330 million NHS contract, awarded in 2023 by Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government, to create a data platform for personal health information that has spurred fears over the privacy of patient medical records.
The company’s co-founder and chairman, Peter Thiel, is a long-time Trump donor, having given at least $1.75 million (£1.31 million) to Trump campaigns from 2016 to 2020.
OpenAI is not hiding its intention to embrace off-grid gas as the energy source for its data centre construction frenzy in the UK, or its cosy relationship with Trump.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, is closely aligned with both Trump and several climate deniers, having donated $1 million (£750,000) to the president’s inauguration.
Nevertheless, in July, Labour deepened its relationship with the creator of ChatGPT – signing a memorandum of understanding with OpenAI to “turbocharge” UK AI.
The government is already using ChatGPT in “Humphrey”, a Whitehall tool designed to “speed up the civil service by taking away admin burdens”, as well as “Consult”, an AI tool which “speeds up the policy making process by automatically sorting public responses to consultations.”
OpenAI has already started powering data centres with gas. Its U.S. Stargate Project site in Texas, slated to become one of the largest data centre sites in the world, is installing off-grid gas turbines to power its operations.
The firm has chosen not to disclose the carbon footprint of ChatGPT-5, its most advanced AI model to date, despite the fact that researchers told The Guardian it uses “significantly more energy than GPT-4o”. The company, which is rapidly expanding across the globe, does not have publicly announced climate or sustainability targets.
These choices are reflected in the views of Altman, who said in a U.S. Senate hearing in May that “in the short term, I think [the future of powering AI] probably looks like more natural gas.”
Altman has also said that he thinks AI will solve climate change, despite the technology’s ever-expanding demand for power.
Altman’s history with climate deniers goes back to the beginning of his career when Thiel served as his mentor. The OpenAI CEO also previously donated $32,000 (£23,000) to climate denier Michael Shellenberger’s failed 2022 campaign for Governor of California.
Shellenberger has made extensive claims denying the severity of climate change, including that “humans are not causing a ‘sixth mass extinction’”, “the Amazon is not ‘the lungs of the world’”, and “climate change is not making natural disasters worse”.
Shellenberger is well known for his nuclear energy advocacy, which aligns with Altman’s own long-held positions.
In a 2015 blog on Altman’s personal website, he argued,:“The 20th century was the century of carbon-based energy. I am confident the 22nd century is going to be the century of atomic energy.”
Nvidia
Nvidia’s ties to Labour go well beyond its role in the freshly-announced Stargate UK data centre project.
The supercomputer chip company, which donated $1 million (£750,000) to Trump in January, has pledged to invest £2 billion to develop the UK AI sector and to deploy 120,000 advanced computer chips across the UK.
Earlier in the summer, the government also announced that it would collaborate with Nvidia on training the UK workforce via a “nationwide AI talent development pipeline”. An agreement was also forged for Nvidia to provide AI resource tools to UK universities.
Amazon
In June, Amazon, which donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and is the biggest owner of data centres in the world, pledged to invest £40 billion in the UK over three years, which includes a £8 billion investment in UK data centres.
It is also part of a Labour government initiative to provide. AI training to UK workers.
The UK government’s reliance on Amazon goes well beyond its Labour-era deals – it has won £1.7 billion in UK government contracts since 2016.
Though Amazon announced a plan in 2019 to eliminate or offset all company carbon emissions by 2040, its emissions spiked by about 40 percent by 2023, around the time that it stopped reporting its electricity usage.
It has also recently come under fire for obscuring the full extent of its data centre water consumption.
The company has since expressed interest in running its data centres on gas. Amazon Web Services (AWS) applied for planning permission in 2024 to build a gas-powered data centre in Oregon, but eventually withdrew the plans.
At an energy summit this April, Kevin Miller, Amazon’s vice president of global data centres, announced to a room of oil and gas executives that “to have the energy we need for the grid [to power data centres], it’s going to take an ‘all of the above’ approach for a period of time.”
Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, dreams of a world powered by ever-expanding energy consumption, including AI data centres powered by solar in space.
“Everybody on this planet is going to want to be a first-world citizen using first-world amounts of energy, and the people who are first-world citizens today using first-world amounts of energy. We’re going to want to use even more energy,” he told the audience at a private event at the exclusive Yale Club of New York City in 2019.
To achieve this grand energy expansion, Bezos envisions a solar system populated by a “trillion” people living on space stations.
“[We] don’t want to face a civilisation of stasis… if we just stay on this planet – that’s the long-term issue. You have to capture more of the sun’s output,” he said.
Science journalist Adam Becker called Bezos’s space station utopia “a distraction from solutions to the climate crisis here and now”.
He added: “It’s sad to see one of the wealthiest people in the world waste his power and influence on something so pointless instead of actually helping with the biggest problem that humanity has ever faced.”
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Conservative influencer Robby Starbuck’s hiring at Meta was apparently part of a legal settlement. Credit: CNBC
Right-wing influencer Robby Starbuck has a new job advising on political bias in Meta’s AI tools. His record on climate is concerning, say advocates.
A conservative political activist recently appointed to be Meta’s new artificial intelligence anti-bias advisor is a well-known climate change denier, DeSmog has learned.
Robby Starbuck — best known for opposing corporate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, particularly among brands popular with conservatives — has a track record of denying the science of climate change. These views could seriously compromise the climate content accessed by Instagram and Facebook users, climate advocates warn.
In August 2024, Starbuck told CNN that “corporate policies to slow down the effects of human-caused climate change do nothing positive for society,” that “the climate has always changed” and that “human beings have very little control over it.”
In his new advisory role, Starbuck will be responsible for removing alleged political bias from Meta’s artificial intelligence tools. This may result in a surge of climate change denialism and climate science disinformation on Meta’s social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, say climate advocates.
Starbuck’s appointment appears to be at odds with Meta’s stated goals of reaching “net zero emissions across our value chain in 2030” by way of a “science-aligned emissions reduction target in line with the Paris Climate agreement.”
But his appointment comes at a time when major tech companies like Meta and Google are walking back their sustainability initiatives, a process likely motivated by a broad conservative-led anti-ESG political campaign, according to a 2024 Harvard Business Review analysis.
“Putting Starbuck in charge of Meta’s AI policies is the latest reason to believe that Facebook and Instagram are billboards for disinformation,” said Phil Newell, communications co-chair of Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD), a global coalition of over 50 climate and anti-disinformation organizations.
Why Meta appointed Starbuck
Starbuck — who produced music videos prior to becoming a conservative activist and MAGA influencer — has no scientific background or experience in climate science.
Yet that hasn’t stopped him from promoting a conspiracy that record 2024 floods in Dubai were the result of “weather modification,” or that the U.S. should “LEAVE and DEFUND the UN!” in response to its positions on climate change.
It is the general consensus of the scientific community and most of the world’s governments that climate change is real and caused by human activity.
He was apparently appointed to the role as part of a legal settlement. The conservative influencer had sued Meta after the company’s AI chatbot incorrectly linked Starbuck to the January 6th insurrection.
Starbuck’s appointment appears to contrast with Meta’s previous climate statements, including a July 2023 document entitled “Our Path to Net Zero” which stated that “operating sustainably and addressing climate change through bold, meaningful action are paramount to our mission.”
Yet in recent years Meta and other tech companies have appeared to walk back such commitments as they build data centers that have largely been powered by fossil fuels.
They’ve also cultivated closer relationships with Trump. Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft all made $1 million donations to Trump’s second inauguration fund.
Meta’s ties to Trump
Newell argues that Meta’s retreat on climate action coincides with new leadership that takes the crisis less seriously. He pointed to the 2025 appointment of chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan, who is credited with developing Meta’s Washington lobbying effort, as well as bringing CEO Mark Zuckerberg into Donald Trump’s orbit.
About a week after Kaplan’s appointment, Meta announced that it would eliminate fact checkers from moderating content on its platforms. Zuckerberg said that the company would henceforth rely on users to counter climate change denialism and misinformation.
Newell told DeSmog that the prevalence of right-wing propaganda and disinformation on platforms such as Facebook is profitable, and likely why such content isn’t being banned.
Meta’s hiring of Starbuck comes as the Trump administration is leading a coordinated attack on mainstream climate science. In July, the Department of Energy released a report on climate change that actual climate scientists condemned as “biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policymaking.” The report — authored by five well-known climate science deniers — aimed to undermine the scientific consensus that human activity underlies climate change.
According to CNN, Starbuck may be involved in efforts to reduce or eliminate “AI hallucinations” – false or nonsensical information provided in response to queries. As such, an exceptionally high-profile conservative activist will have a say in one of the world’s most widely used AI systems.
Even prior to hiring Starbuck, Meta’s AI has already been criticized for leaning heavily on carbon capture as a potential climate change solution, despite the considerable expert analysis that has largely concluded the technology is an ineffective smokescreen to permit continued fossil fuel production.
AI climate denial
Researchers with CAAD have identified bigger, more systemic climate problems with AI.
CAAD estimates that even if tech companies improved AI data centers’ energy efficiency by 10 percent, but also doubled the number of data centers, it would increase carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent.
“There’s definitely a significant harm happening that’s already greater than the promises of pro-AI boosters,” said Newell.
Starbuck’s appointment — only the most recent example of the right-wing’s takeover of Big Tech — signals that the problem will likely get worse, especially if Meta’s AI is programmed to consider actual climate science politically or ideologically biased, he argued.
DeSmog reached out to Meta and Starbuck for comment, but did not receive a reply.
dizzy: I suggest that AI should be regarded as certainly not impartial and instead anti-Democratic and supportive of Fascism. For example Musk’s chatbot Grok is censored after confirming that Israel and the United States is committing genocide in Gaza and Google’s AI getting censored so that it fails to confirm that Trump is demented. It follows that AI should be opposed since it’s supportive of Fascism and anti-Democratic.
Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark RichardsElon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
“It is clear that Israel is paving the ground for an attack on the flotilla. World public opinion needs to mobilize against Israel’s next war crime. Now!”
Evidence posted over the weekend online appears to show that tech giant Google has allowed the government of Israel to purchase sponsored content spots so that online users searching on the Global Sumud Flotilla will be shown inaccurate, propagandized content accusing the flotilla particpants as being allied with violent, terrorist elements.
The Sumud Flotilla—a group of international humanitarians and peace activists sailing toward the coast of Gaza with over 40 vessels in its fleet as a way to break the unlawful blockade of life-saving supplies imposed by Israel and its allies amid an ongoing genocide—has no documented connection to any terrorist organization and has made clear repeatedly that it is a completely nonviolent effort by independent groups and individuals who want to see an end to the suffering, starvation, and death taking place in the besieged Palestinian enclave.
In Arabic, sumud translates as steadfastness and resilience. On its website, the groups says, “We are a coalition of everyday people—organizers, humanitarians, doctors, artists, clergy, lawyers, and seafarers—who believe in human dignity and the power of nonviolent action.”
David Adler, an American economist and co-coordinator general of Progressive International who is traveling as part of the flotilla, posted a screenshot Saturday of search results showing the sponsored content, calling it “very terrifying.” Many others online reported getting the same results, though the appearance of the sponsored content seemed to depend on the user’s location or other variables.
Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece and co-founder of Progessive International, posted a similar screenshot earlier in the day, describing the coordinated ad buy as part of an escalating “smear campaign against the flotilla” by the Israeli government.
“First, they called it the Hamas Flotilla, deploying the usual tactic of slapping the Hamas logo on anyone whom they are about to murder, maim or mutilate,” said Varoufakis. “Now, with the full cooperation of Google, they are ensuring that top search results—received by anyone who Googles ‘Global Sumud Flotilla’—identify the brave women and men who are sailing to Gaza to end the blockade and genocide of 2 million people are people ‘harboring terror.’ It is clear that Israel is paving the ground for an attack on the flotilla. World public opinion needs to mobilize against Israel’s next war crime. Now!”
🚨 URGENT MESSAGE FROM THE FLOTILLA: we need your help & attention to keep the flotilla safe.
Israeli propaganda is predictive of Israeli conduct: when they want to ridicule a flotilla, they call it a ‘selfie yacht’.
DropSite Newsnoted on Satuday that a team of its journalists reported earlier this month that Google “was in the middle of a six-month, $45 million contract with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office to run ads and spread online propaganda, including on YouTube.”
“A search for the Global Sumud Flotilla humanitarian convoy carrying aid to break the Gaza siege shows the Israeli government’s incitement as the top result,” the outlet noted on Saturday, pointing to Adler’s post. “The campaign has also promoted content denying the Gaza famine.”
Earlier this week, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs characterized the flotilla—which has now been targeted at least twice by drone attacks—as a “jihadist initiative,” which led to immediate concerns that Israel was trying to build a case in the arena of public opinion for what would eventually be an Israeli attack on the ships or an interdiction at sea.
On Tuesday, as Common Dreamsreported, the foreign ministers of 16 nations—Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Ireland, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Mexico, Pakistan, Qatar, Oman, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, and Türkiye—warned against “any unlawful or violent act against the flotilla” and called on all parties “to respect international law and international humanitarian law.”
The ministers said that “any violation of international law and human rights of the participants in the flotilla, including attacks against the vessels in international waters or illegal detention, will lead to accountability.”
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAVote Labour for Genocide.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told an AI conference that data centers should be powered by coal, gas, and nuclear. Ruth Porat said his “comments were fantastic.”
This article is being co-published with The Lever, an investigative newsroom. Click here to get The Lever’s free newsletter.
At a recent artificial intelligence conference in Washington, D.C., Google’s president cheered on Trump’s interior secretary after he slammed Silicon Valley’s support of the so-called “climate extremist agenda” and pushed to expand the use of “incredibly clean” coal plants and other fossil fuels to power data centers, according to a previously unreported recording.
Following the speech by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer of Google and Alphabet, told conference attendees that “I thought Secretary Burgum’s comments were fantastic… [B]ecause I think it is very clear that to realize the potential of AI, you have to have the power to deliver it. And we have underinvested in this country, and to stay ahead, we need to actually address it head-on.”
Porat was speaking on a panel about how AI is “rewriting America’s future,” alongside Big Tech leaders including venture capitalist Delian Asparouhov and Kevin Weil, the chief product officer for OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT. During the panel, Porat also discussed a Google white paper advocating for U.S. investments in natural gas and nuclear to power the industry’s energy-hungry data centers.
Google and other major tech companies as recently as a few years ago led the corporate world in acknowledging the seriousness of the climate emergency and proposing concrete actions to limit Silicon Valley’s carbon emissions. Porat’s company has for years positioned itself as a climate leader in the tech industry. Among its many promises? An ambitious 2020 pledge to power all its operations with carbon-free energy by 2030.
Yet Porat’s comments at the Hill & Valley Forum, and her subsequent praise in July for the Trump administration’s “energy abundance” agenda — which supports oil, gas, and coal while severely penalizing renewables such as wind and solar — signal that, at a time when climate action is under serious threat from Republicans, the country’s largest tech companies are wavering in their support for the cheapest, cleanest, and lowest-carbon energy sources.
That’s reflected in Google’s carbon emissions, which soared nearly 50 percent between 2019 and 2024, according to a company environmental report. An independent study from the NewClimate Institute, a German nonprofit, warned in August of a “crisis” for the tech giant’s ability to meet its climate targets, stating that “data centre expansion and higher artificial intelligence (AI) usage have rapidly increased Google’s electricity demand and absolute [greenhouse gas] emissions.”
Google didn’t respond to a media request about Porat’s comments.
“Climate Extremist Agenda”
Founded in 2021, the Hill & Valley Forum is an organization that brings together prominent tech executives and venture capitalists with federal policymakers. This year’s event, which took place in late April, featured the likes of Palantir CEO Alex Carp and billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, alongside politicians including Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson.
The opening remarks were delivered by Burgum, a former North Dakota governor with close ties to the fossil fuel industry. As interior secretary, Burgum oversees management and conservation of federal land. Previous reporting showed that in 2024, months prior to being nominated by Trump for the position, Burgum hosted a private dinner for oil, gas, and coal executives.
Burgum, a Republican, used his speech to criticize Silicon Valley for having supported “the climate extremist agenda,” which he defined as the idea that “a degree of temperature change in the year 2100 is the thing that we should drive every policy in America.” Burgum added: “I’ve always been a little offended by that.”
Echoing common climate-denier talking points about the inability of climate models to predict future temperature rise, Burgum questioned “how a group could take a spreadsheet and extrapolate [climate] data for 90 years, 80 years, now 75 years and say ‘this is absolutely what’s going to happen.’”
He then positioned coal as an energy source that can power Big Tech’s data centers. “Any coal plant running in America today is incredibly clean,” he claimed without evidence.
Burgum concluded by stating that accelerating production of American oil, gas, coal, and potentially some nuclear would be key to realizing Silicon Valley’s AI agenda.
“That’s the Trump plan, and that’s what we’re doing right now,” he said.
Google Leader On Burgum’s Vision for AI: “Fantastic”
Porat, the Google president, expressed no qualms with Burgum’s speech when she was asked about it on a panel later that day, instead stating that his “comments were fantastic.” Porat then elaborated that Google and the Trump administration were in agreement about needing to scale up nuclear production and modernize the electrical grid.
Five years ago, Google CEO Sundar Pichai warned that “we have until 2030 to chart a sustainable cause for our planet or face the worst consequences of climate change.” He outlined a plan to power its data centers by doing “things like pairing wind and solar power sources together, and increasing our use of battery storage.”
But at the Hill & Valley Forum, Porat outlined an energy agenda much more favorable to fossil fuels. During the panel, she touted a recent Google white paper that didn’t once mention wind or solar, even though they generally remain the cheapest form of power generation worldwide. The document instead called for federal investment in “affordable, reliable, and secure energy technologies, including geothermal, advanced nuclear, and natural gas generation with carbon capture (among other sources).”
Others at the conference voiced direct skepticism of renewable energy, including David Friedberg, co-host of the popular pro-Trump tech podcast All-In. “To scale up energy, it’s not about solar, it’s not about wind, those might have been nice from a narrative perspective, but scalable energy production requires these next-gen systems and we have to unlock that,” he claimed during a panel about reindustrializing America.
In reality, last year, nearly 93 percent of new power additions worldwide came from renewable sources.
Trump’s AI Action Plan
When the Trump administration unveiled its AI Action Plan in Washington, D.C., in late July, the event was presented in the form of a live podcast hosted by Friedberg and his other All-In co-hosts, as well as the founders of Hill & Valley.
“We need to build and maintain vast AI infrastructure and the energy to power it,” the plan reads. “To do that, we will continue to reject radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape, as the Administration has done since Inauguration Day.”
The plan claims that it will ensure free speech in AI systems by eliminating “references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change.” It further constricts federal spending to developers of the type of AI models, such as ChatGPT or Elon Musk’s Grok, “who ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias.”
Some climate groups were quick to condemn the proposal. “This U.S. AI Action Plan doesn’t just open the door for Big Tech and Big Oil to team up, it unhinges and removes any and all doors,” KD Chavez, executive director of the national advocacy group Climate Justice Alliance, said in a statement.
But if Google has any concerns about the anti-climate AI policies being pursued by the White House, the company isn’t showing it. At a mid-July AI event in Pennsylvania, Porat heaped more praise on the Trump administration.
“Mr. President, thank you for your leadership and for your clear and urgent direction that our nation invest in AI infrastructure, technology and the energy to unlock its benefits so that America can continue to lead,” she said.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that Reform UK has received millions and millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
