Google has pledged to stop building customized artificial intelligence (AI) tools that help oil and gas firms to extract fossil fuels worldwide.
The pledge came after a Greenpeace report on Tuesday highlighted how Google, Microsoft, and Amazon use AI and warehouse servers to help the likes of Shell, BP, and ExxonMobil to locate and retrieve oil and gas deposits from the earth.
“While Google still has a few legacy contracts with oil and gas firms, we welcome this indication from Google that it will no longer build custom solutions for upstream oil and gas extraction,” said Elizabeth Jardim, senior corporate campaigner for Greenpeace USA, according to reports.
“Despite the biggest cloud companies’ commitments to address climate change, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all have connections to some of the world’s dirtiest oil companies for the explicit purpose of getting more oil and gas out of the ground and onto the market faster and cheaper,” the Greenpeace report reads.
Google has a reputation for being one of the greenest large tech firms in the world. Unlike other tech giants, it has been carbon neutral since 2007 by using strategies like buying renewable energy to match its use of non-renewable energy.
