The carbon footprint of Google AI Pro
Google publishes some per-prompt figures: a technical paper covering the full serving stack, reporting both market- and location-based emissions. Below is what a Google AI Pro subscription plausibly emits in a month, with every assumption shown, and a pass that funds well beyond it.
Disclosed by the maker
Google AI Pro$19.99/mo plan · Standard paid Gemini usage
Estimated emissions a month
6.9 g – 1.3 kg CO₂e
At the high end, about 0.14 quarter-pound beef burgers a month.
Everyday pass · $3 a month
Funds about 110 kg of verified carbon credits a month — roughly 84× the high end of this estimate.
The assumptions
- AI Pro
- 10 to 100 queries a day, with up to 25% long reasoning answers at the high end.
- Per query
- The median Gemini Apps text prompt, measured across the full serving stack — AI chips, host machines, idle capacity and data-centre overhead. The low CO₂e figure is Google's own (market-based); the high end applies Google's location-based grid factor, which is our calculation.
- Left out
- Image and video generation, and the large contexts coding agents read on every step — no published study measures those yet.
Plan details from Google — Google AI subscriptions, checked 2026-09-15. Carbon Shredder is not affiliated with Google. How we estimate every plan.
Common questions
- How much CO₂ does Google AI Pro produce?
- By our estimate, 6.9 g – 1.3 kg CO₂e a month — from light use to hard daily use with long reasoning answers. Nobody outside Google knows actual usage, so this is a range, not a measurement.
- Does Google publish the environmental impact of Google AI Pro?
- Google publishes some per-prompt figures: a technical paper covering the full serving stack, reporting both market- and location-based emissions.
- What does the climate pass for Google AI Pro fund?
- The Everyday pass costs $3 a month and funds about 110 kg of verified carbon credits at today's price — roughly 84× the high end of our estimate. The credits are retired in your name with registry serial numbers.
- Does the pass make Google AI Pro carbon neutral?
- No. It funds verified carbon credits, which you can check on a public registry. The emissions from your AI use still happened — the honest claim is how many kilograms of credits you funded.