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.