Apple’s AI Ambitions Leave Big Questions Over Its Climate Goals

Here’s a simple question: Is the current top iPhone better for the environment than the top iPhone was five years ago?

Let’s take the iPhone Pro series. If we’re looking at recycled and renewable materials, it’s an easy yes. Compare the iPhone 11 Pro, released in September 2019, with the iPhone 16 Pro, released in September 2024, and there has been good progress—from a few smaller components and packaging to now at more than 25 percent of the whole phone. There's work to do, of course, but that's what you’d expect at Apple’s halfway point to its 2030 goal of carbon neutrality.

But what the iPhone is made out of is only one part of the picture. Take a look at the carbon emissions for each iPhone’s life cycle, including everything from materials to the electricity for manufacturing, transportation and charging, and things get more complicated. The AI race is only compounding the problem.

In 2020, the year Apple set out its net-zero climate goals, per-phone emissions were 82 kilograms CO2E (carbon dioxide equivalent) for the iPhone 12 Pro. After a sharp decrease to 69 kilograms in the iPhone 13 Pro, progress that Apple attributes to its Supplier Clean Energy Program, things start to slow—and then, with the iPhone 15 Pro, stall almost completely.

It’s at this point that Apple changed its reporting in a way that makes it harder to understand year-on-year improvements—moving to a comparison versus a 2015 baseline of 92 kilograms instead. So when the iPhone 16 Pro arrived in 2024 with the same level of emissions as the 15 Pro, it was still positioned as having greenhouse gas emissions savings of 30 percent rather showing those savings at a relative standstill, year on year.

So while, yes, the current top iPhone is better for the environment than five years ago (and the figures for some of the base models show even greater improvements), most of that progress was made between 2020 and 2022. As Apple has pushed forward with AI and introduced emissions-heavy technological innovations to support it, the company has been left mostly treading water. All while, in contrast, 2023’s Fairphone 5 managed to get its life cycle emissions down to just 42 kilograms. (Fairphone will release the figures for its newer Fairphone 6 in October.)

The wider context here, though, is that the house is on fire. Google’s total greenhouse gas emissions increased an astonishing 48 percent between 2019 and 2023—in part due to its energy-guzzling AI data centers—and last year it dropped its carbon neutrality pledge (though it still claims it will be at net-zero emissions by 2030). Elsewhere, Microsoft’s total emissions increased by 23 percent from 2020 to 2024, which it attributed to growth in AI and cloud expansion, Amazon’s shipping and delivery emissions keep going up, and Samsung is running behind on its more limited net-zero aims.

As the kids say, the bar is in hell. At least Apple hasn’t backtracked; Apple’s still playing. But as Tim Cook doubles down on Apple's commitment to AI, can Cupertino keep up with its climate goals while pushing forward in its AI ambitions?

Slowing Progress

In a comment to WIRED, Apple didn’t exactly acknowledge the challenges it’s facing. “As data clearly show, Apple is on track to meet our ambitious goal to be carbon neutral across our entire footprint by 2030,” it said.

“We’ve reduced our global emissions by more than 60 percent since 2015 and worked with our suppliers to bring nearly 18 gigawatts of clean energy online across our supply chain. We’re laser-focused on continuing this progress with more collaboration and innovation in the years ahead.”

However, at the September 2024 iPhone launch, Apple was pretty quiet about its sustainability progress. There were only a few mentions of the recycled materials used across its hardware and its packaging—a stark contrast to the five-minute chat with Octavia Spencer as Mother Nature that opened 2023’s event.

Then, in April 2025, Reuters reported that Apple had chartered a cargo jet with a capacity of 100 tons out of Chennai airport in Tamil Nadu, India. It was the sixth chartered flight on the route since March, designed to beat Trump’s tariffs and get an estimated 1.5 million iPhones into the United States, fast.

This might seem like a questionable move for a company striving for carbon neutrality, but Lena Chang, climate and energy program director at Greenpeace East Asia, says things like this are actually the least concerning issue facing Apple's 2030 pledge: “It’s ironic to point out [the cargo jets], but transportation emissions are a small part of the supply chain.”

Instead, Greenpeace points to other forces it believes are slowing Apple’s progress. According to Apple’s 2025 Environmental Progress Report, reductions in its total “Scope 3” manufacturing emissions—the indirect greenhouse gas emissions outside of the company’s control but created due to its operations—slowed to a 13 percent decrease between September 2023 and September 2024 versus an equivalent 30 percent decrease from 2022 to 2023.

To explain this, Chang and her team are focused on what they see as the gap between Apple’s commitments and those of its suppliers in Asia, producing an easily digestible ranking of the recent climate progress and commitments of the five major final assembly suppliers to Apple: Foxconn, Luxshare Precision, Wistron, Compal and Pegatron.

Of them all, only Wistron has commitments that align with Apple’s (100 percent renewable energy by 2030), but the company hasn’t released any data for 2024 as yet. Pegatron is only committed to 50 percent in the same time, with Foxconn and Compal not hoping to make 100 percent until 2040 and 2050 respectively.  (WIRED requested comment from all five of these suppliers and received no reply.)

Chang points to the ambition of Apple’s two Clean Energy Funds in the region, worth around $400 million, but wants to see stronger accountability from the company regarding its suppliers in mainland China and Taiwan.

“We are talking with some suppliers of Apple, and they actually complain that ‘yeah, we see there's money there, but there's just not enough incentive for us to initiate a project,’” Chang explains. “We need suppliers to take more initiative, and we need stronger enforcement from Apple, whether it's monitoring on a year-to-year basis or strengthening its reporting mechanism to really push its suppliers to adopt more renewable energy.”

This problem now stretches to India too, alongside Vietnam, as Apple scrambles to shift the assembly of the iPhones bound for the US, due to instability around global tariffs. Foxconn accounts for a large share of the local iPhone assembly in the region, but Tata Electronics, a subsidiary of Tata Group, is growing in importance after several big investments. (WIRED requested comment and sustainability data from Tata Electronics; the company said it cannot accommodate the request.)

“Tata Electronics itself, as a subsidiary, has not said anything yet on climate—anything significant,” says Ashish Fernandes, CEO and founder of Climate Risk Horizons, a think tank covering India’s energy transition. Tata Group has various climate commitments and was carbon neutral for its energy usage for a period, but Fernandes says it isn’t clear how these impact the iPhone assembly operations—a lack of clarity he believes can’t continue: “If you want to manufacture for Apple, there’s going to be a lot of scrutiny.”

It isn’t alone. From the 14 suppliers that have manufacturing units for Apple in India, Climate Risk Horizons researcher Simran Kalra says, only three have specified their renewable energy share in India—and it isn’t particularly good news.

FIH Mobile’s 2024 ESG report showed a renewable energy ratio for its two plants in Tamil Nadu was 35.5 percent (FIH said it is not currently “a direct Apple supplier,” but the company has previously worked with Apple), while Flex’s was around 27 percent in both 2023 and 2024. As for Pegatron? Its 2022 and 2023 reports showed it used no renewable energy in India at all.

“India is not exactly a country where it's difficult to get renewables going,” says Fernandes. “We’ve got a pretty big domestic renewables industry already. So it should be fairly simple for Apple to insist to its suppliers that they meet the bulk of it from renewables and 100 percent by ‘X’ date.”

The AI Problem

However, it is the conflict between AI and climate goals that can be viewed as the most “vicious cycle,” as UK-based analyst Jan Stryjak, who leads Counterpoint Research’s work on sustainability, puts it.

“AI is hugely costly when it comes to energy usage and water. So a lot of companies are using AI to make their operations more efficient in order to use more AI, or to support more AI, which in turn requires them to be more energy and operationally efficient. Apple is no different.”

At first blush, Apple Intelligence at least looks to be somewhat different. It aims to offer an on-device, privacy focused, perhaps more climate-friendly alternative to the cloud-based AI agents. For user requests that need larger models, Apple points to its creation of Private Cloud Compute, hosted on Apple silicon servers at the company’s data centers, which are powered by 100 percent renewable energy.

But can Apple scale this 100 renewable infrastructure while competing in a field where it is lagging behind? According to Data Centre Map, Apple operates 16 of these data centers, with six more sites planned or under construction. For comparison, OpenAI partner and investor Microsoft has 120-plus data centers, Amazon runs 200-plus, and Google runs 66 with at least 30 more planned—the very expansions behind some of the biggest climate progress reversals.

Even as a smaller, more energy-efficient AI agent, Apple Intelligence still has power trade-offs—particularly when it leans on ChatGPT to answer some search questions in Siri, a partnership which Apple said late last year is not part of the Private Cloud Compute plan.

“A year ago, when they were talking about Apple Intelligence, it struck me how they were doing an ‘all of the above,’ right? They had their own thing but they could fall back onto ChatGPT,” says Ben Lee, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the department of electrical and systems engineering, who has previously consulted for Meta and Google on sustainability.

“That suggests that they're not quite sure that the smaller models give them what they want on device,” he says. “I think they're trying to develop the capability first and foremost and then trying to figure out efficiency later.”

The path to developing more advanced AI capabilities hasn’t exactly been smooth, with key features painfully delayed and next-gen Siri pushed further and further back—with the upgrade now not expected until spring 2026. Recent Bloomberg reporting suggests that Apple leadership is weighing a move to OpenAI or Anthropic technology to help finally deliver its AI promises for a new version of Siri, with tests of these outside models on Apple’s cloud infrastructure. The question is: Will Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environment, policy, and social initiatives, be at that table when these decisions are made?

Even if she is, there is no getting away from the electricity needed to manufacture the advanced semiconductor chips powering on-device Apple Intelligence (like the A18 and A18 Pro chips) and Apple’s own AI servers (reportedly Apple’s M4 chips as of this year). “Taiwan doesn't have such a rapid deployment of renewable energy, and South Korea, another place that fabricates a lot of chips, doesn't have a lot of it at all,” says Lee.

In March, TSMC—the Taiwan-based semiconductor chipmaker which powers flagship iPhones—put out a 2024 report, including a section on ESG: There was a 19 percent increase in greenhouse gas emissions per product unit versus its target of a 10 percent decrease. There was also a 14 percent increase in water use and, drumroll please, only around 14 percent of its used energy came from renewables.

The TSMC press team, when asked for comment, pointed to TSMC accelerating its renewable energy timeline by 10 years in 2023, a 20-year joint procurement agreement for 20,000 gigawatt-hours of renewable energy, and its partnership with Apple on the Restore Fund for carbon-removal projects.

But Greenpeace’s Lena Chang wants to see TSMC investing more into Taiwan’s wind, solar, and geothermal energy industries, following Google’s lead there. “The majority of TSMC’s renewable energy is purchased,” she says. “They can take the initiative to invest more. From a passive consumer to a proactive prosumer, that’s what we are trying to call out TSMC to do more.”

An iPhone Afterlife

Of course one of the trickiest threads to solve in all of this is the incompatibility of building AI-capable chips for iPhones which are used on average for just two and a half years before a customer upgrades to a new device.

“Unlike data centers, which buy hardware and then deploy them for very long lifetimes and get very high utilization, you don't get that in the consumer electronics side,” says Lee. “Apple would like us to refresh our hardware every two years or so. So that's the difficulty. You have the Scope 3 emissions numbers [for the supply chain], then very high refresh rates and relatively poor utilization.”

He believes that after years of flattening in performance and a commoditization of general-purpose CPUs, we otherwise would have seen a slowing down in overall hardware refresh rates: “I think AI is probably restarting the cadence of refresh.”

If we continue to get an iPhone launch annually, if Cupertino continues to pack in advanced Apple silicon into every premium device and upgrade cycles remain at 2.5 years, then attention to the afterlife of iPhones becomes more pressing. Globally, Apple makes up just over half the entire secondary smartphone market and while around one in three owners in the US resell their smartphone, that figure drops to around one in five in Europe.

That's not helped by the fact that the amount Apple currently offers to recover traded-in iPhones is much less than the competition, says Counterpoint’s Jan Stryjak. Elsewhere, in some countries, there’s simply too many different prices and gradings on offer to make sense for the average phone owner: “This is something the industry needs to rectify, to help with giving those older iPhones that second life.”

The Next Five Years

Apple appears not to be blind to the challenges it is facing. In April, Lisa Jackson said this in a press release on Apple’s environmental progress: “As we get closer to 2030, the work gets even harder—and we’re meeting the challenge with innovation, collaboration, and urgency.”

Apple is ]the third biggest company in the world by market cap. As its AI agent strategy becomes clearer, environment charities and sustainability experts see a number of ways that it could strengthen its work toward its 2030 climate goals to counteract new innovation.

Then again, the first and second biggest companies in the world? Nvidia and Microsoft, two of the companies at the forefront of the shift toward AI. “We will keep campaigning on the supply chain decarbonization, especially now there seems to be no stopping in AI technology,” says Greenpeace’s Lena Chang. “It is really important that we keep the balance between AI and sustainable development.”