The Large Energy Users Pledge was announced on March 12 at the CERAWeek energy conference in Houston, Texas. Big companies like Google, Amazon, and Meta have joined a pledge to triple nuclear energy use by 2050.
These tech giants have teamed up with Dow, Allseas, OSGE, and Occidental to push for more nuclear power. This is the first time major businesses outside the nuclear sector have publicly supported such a big nuclear expansion.
The pledge started in September 2023 and already has support from 31 countries, 14 major global banks, and 140 nuclear industry companies.
Nuclear Energy: A Reliable and Scalable Solution
Sama Bilbao y León, Director General of the World Nuclear Association (WNA), said,
“The unprecedented support announced today by some of the world’s most influential companies to at least triple global nuclear capacity by 2050 sends a clear signal to accelerate policy, finance and regulatory changes that enable the rapid expansion of nuclear power. The global shift towards more nuclear highlights this is the only way we’ll deliver the abundant firm clean energy required to power growth and innovation in technology, a host of other industries and the entire economy.”
The pledge highlights nuclear energy’s benefits like:
- Offering stable and reliable power 24/7.
- Not affected by weather conditions like wind or solar.
- Helps industries reduce costs and offers a steady supply of heat for factories and chemical plants.
Other notable companies who have also joined the nuclear pledge are Allseas, Bureau Veritas, Carbon3Energy, Clean Energy Buyers Alliance, Core Power, Dow, Fly Green Alliance, Lloyd’s Register, Occidental, OSGE, and Siemens Energy.
The WNA expects even more businesses to sign the pledge soon. Industries like maritime, aviation, chemicals, and hydrocarbons are showing more interest in nuclear energy.
Dow Energy & Climate Business Vice President Edward Stones said,
“Energy is the lifeblood of global manufacturing and therefore investing and expanding access to clean, reliable, cost-competitive nuclear energy is critical to industrial progress. Dow considers nuclear energy, especially the promising technology of advanced small modular nuclear, to be a long-term competitive source of safe, firm and clean energy.”
The Large Energy Users Pledge
The pledge highlights nuclear power’s role in energy security and economic growth. It calls for a stronger, more reliable energy system with nuclear alongside other clean energy sources.
Here’s a snapshot of the pledge.
Big energy users want to triple nuclear power by 2050 to meet rising energy needs and help economies grow. Their strategy also includes new reactors, including small modular reactors (SMRs) and advanced designs.
How Is Nuclear Power Shaping Global Energy Consumption?
Nuclear energy has been a critical part of the world’s power supply for decades. Today, it provides about 10% of global electricity, with over 400 reactors operating in more than 30 countries.
Some countries, such as France, depend on nuclear power for over 70% of their electricity. The United States and China are also increasing their nuclear capacity. They want to rely less on fossil fuels.
Compared to fossil fuel plants, nuclear power plants operate at a higher capacity factor. This means they produce electricity more efficiently and consistently.
While coal and natural gas plants may run at about 50–60% capacity, nuclear plants often reach 90% or higher. This makes nuclear energy one of the most reliable sources of electricity in the world.
However, some countries are rethinking their nuclear investments. Germany, for example, closed its last nuclear plants in 2023. But now, rising energy costs and supply worries have sparked talks about restarting nuclear programs.
Why Tech Giants Want to Invest in Nuclear?
In 2023, nuclear power plants worldwide generated around 2,600 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity. As electricity demand continues to rise, countries are prioritizing nuclear energy as a reliable solution.
Countries such as the USA and China are leading nuclear expansion efforts, with multiple reactors under construction. It’s for the same reason that big companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle are making this shift toward nuclear to reach their net-zero goals.
Explaining further, the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) is driving up energy use in data centers. Right now, they make up about 2% to 3% of total U.S. power consumption. This number could reach 9% by 2030. This rise is putting pressure on current power systems. As a result, tech giants are looking for new energy sources to meet their increasing demands.
To tackle these challenges, they are looking at nuclear energy, especially small modular reactors. The SMRs can be placed near data centers, ensuring a steady energy supply and reducing environmental impact.
More significantly, one of the biggest advantages of nuclear power is that it is a low-carbon energy source. Unlike coal and natural gas, nuclear reactors do not produce greenhouse gas emissions during operation.
- According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), nuclear energy prevents over 2 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions annually. This makes nuclear power an essential tool in the fight against climate change.
Google’s SMR Investments
Google is looking at nuclear energy to help meet its 2030 net-zero emissions goal, says CEO Sundar Pichai. The company is investing in clean energy, including solar and small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs).
In 2023, Google’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reached 14.3 million tCO2e. This was a 13% increase from the previous year and a 48% jump from 2019. Emissions have been rising since 2020.
Thus, Google made a deal with Kairos Power in October 2025. They plan to build several SMRs to power AI data centers. The first reactor could be running this decade, depending on approvals. More reactors are expected by 2035. This move helps Google lower its carbon footprint while meeting the energy needs of its growing AI operations
Meta Bets on Nuclear for Reliable Clean Energy
Meta has been using 100% renewable energy for its global operations since 2020. Now, the company is exploring nuclear power to meet rising energy demands and support its AI and environmental goals.
Meta’s Urvi Parekh, Head of Global Energy, noted,
“As global economies expand, the need for a reliable, clean, and resilient energy supply is paramount. Nuclear energy, with its ability to provide continuous power, can help meet this rising demand. We’re excited to join alongside this multi-organisational effort with the Tripling Nuclear Pledge to reiterate our commitment to nuclear energy.”
On December 3, Meta announced plans to work with nuclear power developers. The company believes that nuclear energy provides a steady power supply unlike solar and wind energy, making it crucial for grid stability and AI workloads.
Since 2021, Meta has cut emissions by 16.4 million metric tons of CO2e through renewable energy. In 2023, its net emissions were 7.4 million metric tons.
In 2023 alone, the company’s renewable energy initiatives helped cut operational emissions by 5.1 MMTCO2e, while value chain emissions were reduced by 1.4 MMTCO2e. Thus, Meta is optimistic about hitting its net-zero target by adding nuclear energy to its clean energy portfolio.
Amazon’s SMR Strategy
Amazon is adding nuclear power to supply carbon-free energy to AWS data centers and is investing over $52 billion across three U.S. states as part of its massive data center expansion.
The company has signed three key deals to explore and build small modular reactors (SMRs). AWS CEO Matt Garman believes SMRs can provide scalable and reliable power for growing data needs.
In 2023, Amazon’s carbon footprint was nearly 69 million metric tons of CO2—lower than its 2021 peak but still significant.
AWS is working to reduce emissions, betting on SMRs. They hope nuclear could be a game changer, offering a sustainable energy source for the future.
Amazon Web Services’ Brandon Oyer, Head of Americas Energy and Water, said,
“Accelerating nuclear energy development will be critical to strengthening our nation’s security, meeting future energy demands, and addressing climate change. Amazon supports the World Nuclear Association’s pledge, and is proud to have invested more than USD1 billion over the last year in nuclear energy projects and technologies, which is part of our broader Climate Pledge commitment to be net-zero carbon by 2040.”
Global Investment in Nuclear Energy: 2050 Forecast
Notably, global investment in nuclear energy is set to rise. Right now, it’s about $65 billion each year. As per IEA, by 2030, it could hit $70 billion with current policies. Nuclear capacity is expected to grow by over 50% to nearly 650 GW by 2050.
Amazon, Meta, Google, and other companies that have joined the pledge are aware that even with better energy use, industries will still need a lot more power. However, nuclear projects require high upfront costs, long development times, and strict regulations. Despite these challenges, their long lifespan and low carbon emissions make them a strong choice for long-term energy planning.
The post Meta, Google, and Amazon Join Global Pledge to Triple Nuclear Energy by 2050 appeared first on Carbon Credits.
Most businesses that decide to act on their net-zero targets reach the same point of friction. Buying carbon credits has meant tracking down brokers, sitting through sales calls, and requesting a quote just to learn a price, sometimes with limited proof of what you are buying.
The earnings calls that quietly reframed climate from sustainability question to operating risk.
Three earnings calls in the last 18 months tell the story without any help from a press release.
Hershey, May 2024: cocoa price exposure compresses margin, and the company attributes part of the cost shock to West African weather. Olam, July 2024: coffee climate exposure quantified in the annual report. JBS, January 2025: supply chain climate disclosures expanded materially in response to investor pressure and regulatory expectation. None of these companies issued the announcement as climate news. They issued it as financial news. The climate-linked supply chain risk did not arrive with a sustainability framing; it arrived as a P&L line.
You are probably reading this article because you suspect the same thing is happening to your business. This piece walks through what is showing up on which earnings calls, how procurement and finance leaders are quantifying the exposure, and what serious corporates are doing about it before the regulator asks.
Where climate risk has already appeared in earnings
The pattern is consistent across resource-intensive sectors. A weather event compresses supply, the price spikes, the cost flows through the income statement, and the analyst on the call asks whether the event is anomalous or structural. Increasingly, the honest answer is the second one.
Cocoa is the cleanest example. The 2023 to 2024 West African harvest fell sharply on the back of erratic rainfall and disease. Cocoa futures more than tripled. Companies with concentrated West African sourcing absorbed the cost; companies with diversified sourcing absorbed less. The exposure was not climate as ESG topic. It was climate as cost of goods.
Coffee follows the same pattern. Brazilian and Vietnamese harvests have moved on weather more sharply across the last several seasons. Roasters with long-tenor supplier relationships and origin diversification have managed the volatility; roasters with spot-market exposure have not. Wheat, sugar, palm oil, beef: the same dynamic in different commodities, a pattern the IPCC AR6 Working Group II report projects will intensify across agricultural systems through mid-century.
What this means: climate risk is no longer a footnote in the 10-K. It is a line item the CFO has to explain on the call.
The three commodity exposures that hit margin first
For most companies with material Scope 3 exposure, three exposures dominate the near-term P&L risk.
- Concentrated single-origin sourcing in a climate-vulnerable region. If your tier-one supply for any material commodity sits in one geography, you have a concentration risk that climate amplifies. Diversification across origins is the obvious hedge, but it takes years to build and requires relationships you cannot acquire by tender.
- Supplier financial fragility under climate stress. Smallholder farmers, who supply a large share of the global cocoa, coffee, and palm oil market, do not carry the balance sheets to absorb yield shocks. When yields collapse, they exit. When they exit, your supply base shrinks, and the surviving suppliers raise prices. The risk is structural, not cyclical.
- Logistics and storage exposure to extreme weather. Hurricane disruptions to Gulf shipping, drought-driven Panama Canal restrictions, flooding in European inland waterways: each of these has moved input costs in the last three years, a pattern documented in Munich Re’s natural catastrophe data. The exposure shows up as a one-quarter event in the financial press but accumulates over time on the cost line.
TCFD and ISSB disclosure changes
The disclosure architecture has now caught up with the risk. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, whose recommendations are now embedded in the ISSB’s IFRS S2 climate standard, requires companies to disclose climate-related risks across physical and transition categories, with quantification where possible.
For physical risk specifically (the climate-linked supply chain risk you are reading about), the disclosure must address both acute exposures (extreme weather events) and chronic exposures (gradual changes in temperature, precipitation, and growing seasons). The disclosure must address the time horizon over which the risk is material, the parts of the value chain exposed, and the financial impact under different scenarios.
The CSRD imposes similar requirements under European law, with double materiality (both financial and impact materiality) embedded in the assessment. The practical effect: your auditors and your investor relations team now need a defensible answer to the climate-linked supply chain risk question, and the answer needs to be quantified.
What procurement and finance can do now
Three actions matter near-term.
Map your exposure. Most companies do not have a clear view of which tier-one and tier-two suppliers sit in which climate-vulnerable geographies. Without the map, you cannot quantify the risk, and without the quantification, you cannot disclose it credibly. The map is the foundation, and World Resources Institute climate risk research provides useful public tooling to start.
Diversify and deepen, in that order. Diversification across origins reduces concentration risk, but the deeper move is to invest in the resilience of the suppliers you already have. Regenerative practices, agroforestry, soil health interventions: these reduce yield volatility under climate stress and protect your input cost trajectory.
Embed the climate spend inside procurement, not outside it. Treating climate risk as a sustainability cost line subordinates it to the ESG budget. Treating it as a procurement and resilience investment puts it in the budget that matters, which is the cost-of-goods budget that the CFO defends quarterly.
Nature-based supply chain investments are the asset class designed for exactly this purpose. They sit inside the value chain, they reduce climate-linked supply risk, they generate verifiable Scope 3 reductions, and they produce the documentation an auditor and a regulator can both test.
If you are quantifying climate-linked supply chain risk in advance of the next earnings cycle or the next disclosure period, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you map your exposure and structure a Dual-Value Model response that addresses reduction, resilience, and disclosure-readiness in a single program. Schedule a consultation.
More and more small and medium-sized businesses are hearing the same question from their larger customers: What is your carbon footprint? That question now travels down entire supply chains, and it arrives next to tender requirements, certification criteria, and rising customer expectations.
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