AI energy surge: tech giants miss climate targets

Samantha: Welcome to The State of Tech, The European Edition, Thursday September three, 2026. I'm Samantha Lawrence.

Bob: And I'm Bob Russell. Today: tech giants falling behind on their climate promises as AI demand explodes, Uber and Wayve launching the UK's first autonomous ride-hailing service in London, Washington and Brussels drifting further apart on AI regulation, global investors flying to China for so-called tech pilgrimages, and to close out, two things you can try yourself today: the encrypted European email service Proton Mail, and the open-source photo library Piwigo. Let's start with those climate pledges.

A new UN report says tech giants are falling behind on climate targets as AI energy demand explodes.

Samantha: The UN's International Telecommunication Union and the World Benchmarking Alliance published their Greening Digital Companies 2026 report, and the headline is uncomfortable. Tech firms are moving on climate reporting and renewables, but not fast enough to offset what artificial intelligence is doing to their energy bills. Some of the leading AI and cloud providers saw individual emissions jump by up to two hundred and thirty-nine percent between 2020 and 2024. That is a staggering number when the same companies keep telling investors they are on track for net zero.

Bob: And the number really lands when you put it next to what these companies promised only a few years ago. The report, which is based on 2024 data, argues that sustainability needs to be built into how digital technology is designed, powered, and scaled, not bolted on afterwards. Right now the pattern is the opposite: build the AI data centre first, worry about the grid connection and the emissions later. The authors are effectively saying the industry is losing the race against its own growth.

Samantha: For Europe this cuts especially deep. Swisscom and Deutsche Telekom rank near the top of the global assessment, which sounds like good news, but the report frames it more as: even the best in class are not moving fast enough. And European operators sit inside the strictest climate rules on the planet, from the bloc's climate law to national net-zero targets. If Deutsche Telekom is a global leader and still not on track, that tells regulators the current voluntary framework is not going to close the gap.

Bob: There's also a competitive angle here. European data centre operators are being asked to run cleaner, report more, and increasingly connect to grids that are being rebuilt around renewables. Meanwhile the US hyperscalers are pouring tens of billions into AI capacity, sometimes signing deals for gas or even nuclear power to keep up. So the bottom line for European policymakers is that if AI keeps scaling the way it is, the emissions curve does not bend on its own. Expect more pressure in Brussels to tie AI infrastructure permits directly to energy sourcing and efficiency rules, rather than leaving it to corporate pledges.

Uber and Wayve launch the UK's first autonomous ride-hailing service on the streets of London today.

Samantha: Starting today, if you open the Uber app in London and request an UberX, an Uber Electric, or an Uber Comfort, you might be matched with a self-driving car from British firm Wayve. No extra charge. The cars are all-electric Ford Mustang Mach-E vehicles running Wayve's AI driver software, and a trained, licensed private-hire driver sits behind the wheel to supervise every trip. It's the first time autonomous ride-hailing is being offered to regular passengers anywhere in the UK.

Bob: Wayve's approach is worth pausing on, because it is different from most of the American robotaxi effort. Instead of building highly detailed maps of every street in advance, Wayve trains its system to learn to drive more like a human, from cameras and general driving experience. That's why it can be dropped into central London traffic, which is notoriously chaotic, without months of mapping runs first. The safety driver on board today is really a regulatory bridge, not a technical limit, and Uber and Wayve say expansion will be gradual, based on demand, readiness and rules.

Samantha: For London this is a milestone. The city has spent years watching San Francisco and Phoenix get driverless rides while UK regulators worked through the Automated Vehicles Act. Now the first supervised service is actually on the road, and the choice of London matters: if you can handle Old Street roundabout, you can handle a lot of Europe. What passengers will notice first is that nothing looks especially different. You order a ride, a Mach-E turns up, and someone is in the driver's seat. The AI is doing the work, the human is the safety net.

Bob: For the wider European market this launch is a signal. British-built Wayve, backed by big global investors, is showing that a European AI driving stack can go head to head with Waymo and Tesla on their own turf. That will feed directly into the debate in Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam about how quickly to open up city streets to supervised autonomy. And it puts pressure on European transport ministers to explain why passengers in London can hail this service today, while their own cities are still writing the rulebook.

Samantha: Quick interruption. If you listen to The State of Tech regularly, hit that like button and subscribe, that way you'll never miss an episode. Okay, moving on.

Washington pushes lighter AI rules while Brussels sends formal information requests to more than thirty AI companies.

Bob: At the G20 Innovation Ministerial this week, the split between the United States and the European Union on AI regulation was on open display. Washington argued for looser rules to keep industry moving fast. The European Commission went in the opposite direction, confirming that it has sent formal information requests to more than thirty AI companies worldwide. Those requests are a preliminary step under the EU's AI Act, which aims to ban the highest-risk uses of AI and impose transparency standards on the rest.

Samantha: The information requests are the interesting bit, because they turn an abstract law into a concrete process. Brussels is essentially asking companies: tell us what your models can do, how they are trained, and where they are deployed inside Europe. That is the raw material regulators need before they can decide who falls into the high-risk category, and who has to comply with the strictest transparency and safety rules. For companies, replying carefully now is much cheaper than being formally investigated later.

Bob: What this makes clear is that the AI Act is moving from paper into practice. And that has consequences well beyond Europe. Any AI provider that wants European customers, whether that is a US foundation model lab, a Chinese vision-model maker, or a European scale-up, will now have to build a compliance layer specifically for the EU. It is the Brussels effect in real time: the market is big enough that global companies adjust their global products to European rules, rather than build a stripped-down European version.

Samantha: The contrast with Washington is stark. The US position at the G20 was that heavy rules will slow down innovation and hand an advantage to China. Brussels is betting that clear, enforceable rules will actually build trust, and that trust becomes a competitive advantage for European AI. For European companies this is double-edged: more paperwork in the short term, but a clearer legal ground to stand on when they sell into regulated sectors like health, finance, and public services.

Global investors are paying thousands of dollars for factory tours in China as fears of a China shock 2.0 grow.

Bob: A striking trend flagged out of Shanghai: investors, entrepreneurs and executives from around the world are paying thousands of dollars for organised factory tours in China. Data research firms are packaging these so-called tech pilgrimages so global players can see for themselves what Chinese companies are doing in humanoid robots, competitive AI models and mass electric-vehicle production. The subtext, in Western boardrooms, is a worry about a China shock 2.0, where China takes a durable lead in advanced manufacturing.

Samantha: The details matter here. Visitors are not going to see prototypes on a stage. They are walking through factory floors where humanoid robots are handling logistics tasks, and EV plants producing at a scale European carmakers simply do not match today. Chinese AI labs have also released open-weight models that compete with US frontier systems on many benchmarks, at a fraction of the cost. Put that combination together, and you can understand why Western investors are willing to pay a premium just to observe.

Bob: For European industry the implication is uncomfortable. Germany's automotive base, Italy's machine tools, France's industrial champions, they are all in the direct line of fire if Chinese firms scale advanced manufacturing faster and cheaper. It is not only about EVs anymore. It is about the factories that build the machines that build everything else. And unlike ten years ago, the story is no longer that China copies. Increasingly, it is that China iterates and integrates faster, with government support behind it.

Samantha: European policymakers are watching all of this closely, and it feeds into the wider debate about industrial strategy, subsidies for chips and batteries, and tariffs on Chinese EVs. For European companies the practical takeaway is simpler: whatever you thought your China strategy was two years ago probably needs a refresh. And for European investors, the tech pilgrimages are a signal that global capital is repricing where the next manufacturing edge sits.

A serious encrypted European email service you can actually switch to this afternoon, without giving up convenience.

Bob: To close out, two things you can actually use today. The first is Proton Mail, the encrypted email service run out of Geneva, Switzerland. It has been around for years, but the reason to flag it now is that the free tier has quietly become genuinely usable for everyday email, and the mobile apps have caught up with the mainstream providers. You get end-to-end encrypted email, a calendar, and cloud storage, all sitting under Swiss privacy law and outside the reach of US surveillance requests.

Samantha: What makes Proton Mail useful in practice is that setting up a new address takes about two minutes, and you can import from Gmail or Outlook with a built-in tool. Users report that the mobile apps on iOS and Android now feel as smooth as the big US services, with push notifications, quick search, and a straightforward interface. If you send a message to someone else on Proton, the encryption is fully automatic. If you email a regular Gmail user, you can still send a password-protected encrypted message that they open through a link.

Bob: For European listeners there is a specific angle. Proton is a Swiss company, and its data centres are in Switzerland and Germany. That matters if you care about who can legally request access to your inbox. It is free to start, works on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android, and there is a web version that runs in any browser. Many users move to Proton gradually: first for personal email, then family, then side projects. You do not have to abandon Gmail overnight to get a real privacy benefit.

Samantha: One practical tip. Do not just create the account and forget it. Set up email forwarding from your old Gmail so nothing important gets lost, and use Proton's own import tool to bring across the last few years of history. That way, from day one, Proton Mail is your working inbox, not a museum. And if you ever decide to leave, everything exports cleanly. That is the mark of a service built for users rather than lock-in.

A free open-source photo library that keeps decades of family pictures on your own server, no big cloud required.

Bob: The second one is Piwigo, a free open-source photo library that is popular with Europeans who want to stop feeding their family archive into Google Photos or iCloud. Piwigo has been developed in France for years, and it turns any spare computer, or even a cheap web-hosting account, into your own private photo site. You upload your pictures once, organise them into albums, and access them from any browser or phone.

Samantha: The reason it stands out today is that Piwigo has quietly become one of the more polished self-hosted photo tools. Users report that it handles tens of thousands of photos without breaking a sweat, and there are mobile apps for iOS and Android so you can upload straight from your phone. It supports facial recognition, tagging, and search, and it will happily read the location and camera information already stored in your pictures, so albums can organise themselves by date or place.

Bob: If you do not want to run your own server, Piwigo also offers a hosted version from France for a small monthly fee, which keeps your photos inside the European Union under GDPR. That is a real alternative to the big US photo clouds for anyone worried about how their family images are being used to train AI models. And because it is open source, there is no risk of a service being shut down and your library disappearing with it.

Samantha: One tip to make it click: start small. Pick one holiday folder, upload it to Piwigo, share the album link with family, and see how it feels. If that works, migrate the rest over a weekend. Today we covered: tech giants missing their climate promises as AI demand surges, London getting the UK's first autonomous ride-hailing service from Uber and Wayve, the growing split between US and EU on AI regulation, global investors flocking to China for tech pilgrimages, and two things to try yourself: Proton Mail and Piwigo.

Bob: Want to know more or react? Visit stateoftech.eu or email us at info@doorzetters.net.

Bob: State of Tech, the tech world in 15 minutes.