The carbon footprint of Google AI Ultra
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 Ultra subscription plausibly emits in a month, with every assumption shown, and a pass that funds well beyond it.
Disclosed by the maker
Estimated emissions a month
34 g – 12 kg CO₂e
At the high end, about 1.2 quarter-pound beef burgers a month.
Power pass · $5 a month
Funds about 190 kg of verified carbon credits a month — roughly 16× the high end of this estimate.
Estimated emissions a month
69 g – 48 kg CO₂e
At the high end, about 5 quarter-pound beef burgers a month.
Max pass · $9 a month
Funds about 360 kg of verified carbon credits a month — roughly 7.5× the high end of this estimate.
The assumptions
- AI Ultra $100
- 50 to 500 queries a day, with up to 50% long reasoning answers at the high end.
- AI Ultra $200
- 100 to 2,000 queries a day, with up to 50% 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 Ultra produce?
- By our estimate, AI Ultra $100 comes to 34 g – 12 kg CO₂e a month, and AI Ultra $200 comes to 69 g – 48 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 Ultra?
- 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 Ultra fund?
- The Max pass costs $9 a month and funds about 360 kg of verified carbon credits at today's price — roughly 7.5× the high end of our estimate. The credits are retired in your name with registry serial numbers.
- Does the pass make Google AI Ultra 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.