Tech
A warning sign about AI’s real cost, courtesy of Google and Amazon
It’s no secret that AI is a hog, consuming energy and water like no digital technology before it. Now we know just how much Big Tech’s pursuit of AI is costing the environment.
Both Google and Amazon released their sustainability reports this week, and the numbers aren’t pretty. Each company has pledged to zero-out its carbon emissions in the coming years, but AI has made those goals a lot harder to hit. Google’s total carbon emissions are up 25% since last year, Amazon’s are up 16%.
A close reading of the reports suggests that both Amazon and Google will have to make some serious, and potentially costly, adjustments to their businesses if they’re going to achieve their net-zero targets.
Neither company comes out and blames AI directly for the rising emissions, but there’s plenty of indirect evidence.
AI at the center of it all
Both Amazon and Google acknowledge their energy use has increased significantly in the last year as use of AI has risen. Both talk about carbon intensity — essentially, how much pollution a company generates for every dollar of revenue it brings in — a metric China has used over the last several years when negotiating climate treaties even as its emissions were skyrocketing. And both devote several pages touting how AI can benefit the environment, a case of “protesting too much,” to borrow some Shakespeare.
The picture gets clearer the deeper you dig into the data. Both companies are actually doing OK when it comes to carbon pollution from energy purchases. Years of buying renewable power have helped keep a lid on things, though that may change in the near future as tech companies, including Google, have begun to invest heavily in natural gas power plants to keep pace with AI’s power demands.
Rather, most of Amazon’s and Google’s growing carbon footprint comes from so-called Scope 3 emissions — a catch-all category covering pollution a company doesn’t directly control, like the goods and services it buys or the products it sells. For companies like Amazon and Google, Scope 3 includes things like GPU purchases and the use of a company’s products, like phones and tablets.
Google lumps together two categories of Scope 3 emissions — capital goods and use of sold products —though it admits the latter is small enough to not be material. (Most of Google’s hardware products are small devices that don’t consume a lot of electricity.) That likely leaves data centers as the main driver. Last year, Google’s Scope 3 emissions increased by 2.1 million metric tons, which means they’re now double what they were in 2019, the year Google uses as its baseline when assessing its performance.
Amazon’s rising Scope 3 emissions mostly come from capital goods and fuel and energy. The former can include data centers and warehouses, which can help explain why Amazon’s Scope 3 emissions spiked higher than Google’s. Still, a good chunk is probably data centers. “To meet strong customer demand, in 2025 we added more data center capacity globally than any other company, including more than 1.2 gigawatt (GW) in Q4 alone,” Amazon wrote in the report.
Hitting a wall
That kind of spending helps explain why decarbonization is suddenly getting so much harder. For years, the biggest contributor to their carbon footprints was energy for offices and more modestly sized data centers. That could easily be canceled out buying renewable power.
AI has upended that approach. While tech companies could still use renewables plus batteries to power their data centers, they’re starting to fall back on fossil fuels. It’s a trend that will make their net-zero pledges that much harder to deliver, but it’s not irreversible.
The more pernicious emissions come from the construction and outfitting of data centers themselves. The steel and cement industries are both heavy polluters, and while startups are working on low-to-zero carbon approaches, they’re still not ready to deliver at the scale that tech companies need.
Then there are the GPUs and memory chips powering the AI boom. Semiconductor manufacturing uses lots of energy, and many of the world’s leading-edge chip factories are located in Asia, where the electrical grids remain dominated by fossil fuels. Making matters worse, many of the chemicals used in those factories are also potent greenhouse gases, capable of warming the atmosphere thousands of times more than an equivalent amount of CO2. The bingeing on chips has probably inflated both Amazon’s and Google’s carbon footprints.
None of these problems are intractable, though Amazon, Google, and their peers have their work cut out for them. To deliver on their net-zero pledges, they’ll need to ramp up their renewable energy purchases, invest heavily in advanced steel and cement manufacturing, and buy many millions of tons of carbon removal credits. It’s still possible, but their embrace of AI hasn’t made it any easier.
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Tech
Yep, we’re using OpenClaw to date now
Ben Guez has “a bunch of potential international wives in [his] DMs,” thanks to an automated script he set up using OpenClaw, Claude code, and Instagram trial reels.
“I think it’s crazy, like the potential is insane right now,” Guez, a content creator and startup founder, told TechCrunch. “I’m not sure if everyone’s gonna think it’s good, but I mean, it’s working.”
How is Guez wooing so many women? First, he uses the open source AI agent OpenClaw to track World Cup match results. After each game, OpenClaw triggers Claude to create and post a nearly identical Instagram “trial reel” with the same template. In the video, Guez stares out a train car window looking dejected, with the caption: “I can’t believe {COUNTRY} lost… If any {COUNTRY} girls need emotional support… my DMs are open.”
Guez has made the same post, save for the country name, more than a dozen times. But you can’t tell when you look at his profile, since trial reels don’t show up on a creator’s public page. Since he launched this automation, Guez has gotten over one million views and 200 DMs in a few days. That volume is even more impressive considering that Guez says in his profile that he will only answer DMs sent via Canary, his AI language learning app, which means that these women have to download his app.
You have to hand it to him: Guez is really taking “work smarter, not harder” to another level. But once these women realize he doesn’t actually care about Tunisian soccer, wouldn’t they feel played?
“They’re not feeling angry, they’re more impressed, like, ‘Oh, you’re thinking outside of the box, you’re a genius,’” Guez said. “I think as long as you’re open [about] what you’re doing, I think it’s fine.”
TechCrunch was not able to independently verify the actual reactions of these women, so we’ll just have to take Guez’s word for it. But we can tell you that Guez isn’t the only guy getting creative with the viral AI assistant. While Guez’s methods are a bit more outrageous, other people see OpenClaw as a way to streamline the process of setting up dates.
Jeff Weisbein, founder of a tech PR firm, uses OpenClaw to help him figure out where to take dates across different neighborhoods in South Florida.
“I’m meeting women who are in various parts of South Florida, so I don’t know all of the restaurants or things to do,” Weisbein told TechCrunch. “I have my bot just kind of do all the research and make a document with links to why it’s a choice for whatever type of date it is.”
When I fill him in on Guez’s OpenClaw scheme, he bursts out laughing.
“I guess I’m not leveraging OpenClaw to the fullest,” he said. “But definitely in the realm of using OpenClaw to facilitate a task that I would manually have to do otherwise.”
Like Guez, Weisbein doesn’t hide the fact that he’s using AI tools to help plan dates (it backfired, though, when one woman told him, “I hate AI agents”). In a way, asking OpenClaw where to go for happy hour in Fort Lauderdale isn’t that different from Googling the coolest neighborhood bars, but Weisbein says he would draw the line at using AI to mediate his actual conversations with women.
“I have seen people create bots and ways to swipe using OpenClaw, and I wouldn’t do that. They say it’s a numbers game, but if that’s what it takes… that seems like a pretty terrible way to do it,” he said. “I feel like you shouldn’t delegate your communication when you’re in a relationship with someone to AI.”
People seem hesitant to let AI meddle once there’s an actual connection, but a tech worker named Cailey said that once she’s decided to end a flirtation, she doesn’t mind using Claude to break things off.
“I started using Claude and created an automation that crafts ‘I no longer wish to see you’ messages based on a few key terms I would enter about the date. It’d then automatically send them for me at random times so that I wouldn’t feel the anxiety of when to send,” she told TechCrunch. “It worked really well, until I mentioned it to someone I was on a date with, who I then had to send an automated message to, and he asked if he was talking to Claude or Cailey.”
What’s worse: getting ghosted, or getting broken up with by an AI?
OpenClaw rocked the tech world with its potential when it went viral this spring, but security advocates have continuously warned users about the dangers of giving an AI assistant unilateral control over all of your accounts.
For Lazer Cohen, the co-founder of the security-focused OpenClaw alternative NanoClaw, there are steep privacy implications of outsourcing personal relationships to AI, even if his company advertises date planning as a potential use case on X.
“Whenever you’re giving an agent access to personal information and accounts, you need human-in-the-loop approval,” Cohen told TechCrunch. “We’ve all heard the stories of OpenClaw creating dating profiles for people without their knowledge or consent, or OpenClaw dating coaches spilling to other groups that they’re being used as a dating coach too.”
NanoClaw has found its way into Cohen’s love life, though he uses it in a way that’s a bit more wholesome than mass-producing reels that ask heartbroken soccer fans to slide into his DMs.
“My wife and I personally use our NanoClaw assistant, Rosie, to manage the schedules of our five children,” he said. “But ‘claws’ are widely used to help couples get to the child-rearing phase.”
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Tech
Rivian raises EV sales forecast as Q2 production ramps up
Rivian is telling investors that it might see a better sales year than it expected, despite the many headwinds working against electric vehicles in the U.S. right now.
Rivian previously said it would ship between 62,000 and 67,000 vehicles this year, but the company now expects to deliver between 65,000 and 70,000 vehicles, the company said on Thursday.
It’s a small but potentially meaningful bump for the company, which only shipped 42,247 electric vehicles last year. The new forecast comes as EV sales growth has cooled off in the U.S., driven in part by Congress killing the $7,500 federal EV tax credit, and President Trump’s administration axing environmental regulations that encouraged the production and purchase of electric vehicles.
The new forecast could be a sign that the company’s high expectations for its brand new mass-market EV, the R2 SUV, are justified.
Rivian didn’t offer a specific reason for this newfound confidence, only saying it outperformed its own expectations in the second quarter thanks to “robust growth quarter-over-quarter in EDV and R1, coupled with the introduction of R2 deliveries.” (EDV is the name Rivian uses for its electric commercial van.)
Rivian said on Thursday that it built 12,613 vehicles last quarter and delivered 12,194. It had only expected to ship between 9,000 and 11,000.
Rivian has high hopes for the new R2 SUV, which it starting selling last month, starting at around $58,000. The company has expanded its factory in Normal, Illinois, to produce them, and is also building an entirely new production facility in Georgia as it works to manufacture hundreds of thousands of R2s per year.
Rivian hasn’t explicitly said how many R2s it expects to sell this year, but the company’s chief financial officer Claire McDonough has mentioned a range of 20,000 to 25,000 units. It’s unclear if that number has now increased along with the new forecast bump, or if the company expects the excess deliveries to come from its commercial vans and more expensive R1 line of trucks and SUVs.
Either way, more deliveries this year would be good news for Rivian’s bottom line, as the company is still working its way out of a multibillion-dollar hole. The company had said it may finally turn a regular profit in 2027, but it recently pushed that goal off to invest in developing autonomous software, mostly because it now has a deal to supply self-driving R2 SUVs to Uber.
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Tech
Tesla saw a massive sales jump in the second quarter
Tesla delivered more than 480,000 vehicles in the second quarter of this year, an increase of more than 120,000 from the first quarter, in a sign that the company is still able to attract new buyers for its EVs despite a downturn in the U.S. market.
The company said Thursday that it built 451,758 in the second quarter, 442,936 of which were Model 3 sedans and Model Y SUVs. It delivered 467,762 of those vehicles, with the remaining 12,364 being “other models” — which includes the Cybertruck and the final-production Model S sedans and Model X SUVs. It was the company’s best second quarter by raw delivery numbers ever, and easily outpaced Wall Street’s expectations.
It’s Tesla’s best quarter for overall sales since the third quarter of 2025, when it shipped just shy of 500,000 vehicles around the world. And while the company still has an uphill battle to stop a two-year trend of declining overall sales, the second quarter results show Tesla is finding ways — through geographic expansion, and cheaper versions of the Model 3, Model Y, and Cybertruck — to buck that trend.
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