Thin Ice, Formal Agenda: COP31's Antalya Pledge Wants AI's Energy Bill on the Record

For years, the UN climate negotiations treated artificial intelligence as a footnote — a technology somebody else would worry about. That era ended on Monday, when Türkiye’s COP31 presidency announced it will formally put AI’s energy appetite on the summit agenda through a new political commitment: the Antalya Pledge on AI.

Announced on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, the pledge is billed as a commitment covering how AI is “designed, procured, powered, deployed, measured and managed” in support of climate action. COP31 President-designate Murat Kurum, Türkiye’s Minister of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change, framed the demand in blunt terms: “We must openly discuss AI’s growing energy consumption and it is time for governments to start setting the terms. We expect companies to be transparent about their energy use and to power their operations with clean energy.”

What the pledge actually asks for

Details remain deliberately thin ahead of a draft that the presidency says will be published before the summit opens in Antalya in early November. What we know so far:

• Transparency on energy use. Signatory companies would disclose the energy consumption of their data centres — the first time a COP action agenda has asked AI firms to open their power ledgers.
• Clean energy commitments. Companies would be expected to power new AI capacity with renewables, aligning the infrastructure build-out with global climate goals.
• A voluntary format. The pledge lives on the COP’s parallel “action agenda,” not inside the consensus-bound formal negotiations. It does not require approval from the nearly 200 nations that haggle over treaty text, and it carries no binding enforcement.
• A showcase track. A second initiative will present pilot projects “to demonstrate the responsible use of AI in practice,” including a portfolio of AI-enabled clean-technology pilots connecting developers, industry partners and investors.

The centrepiece of Türkiye’s wider COP31 agenda is a separate electrification drive — the 35x35 initiative, which aims to raise electricity’s share of global final energy demand from around 20% today to 35% by 2035. The summit will also dedicate an entire day to technology and AI, a first for the 31-year-old conference series.

‘On thin ice’

The pledge did not land in a vacuum. In a New York speech the same day, UN climate chief Simon Stiell delivered the sharpest warning yet from the UN’s top climate official aimed directly at the AI industry.

AI leaders are “on thin ice when it comes to license to operate, and sinking deep underwater when it comes to public support,” Stiell said. “Energy-guzzling artificial intelligence is driving up planet-heating pollution from coal, oil and gas, while ratcheting up energy costs for households and businesses.”

He pointed to a trend that AI companies rarely advertise: data centre projects are being paused or shelved over public opposition and grid constraints “from New York to Texas.” Local backlash is no longer a fringe phenomenon — it is now shaping where the industry can physically build.

The numbers behind the friction

The IEA projects that greenhouse gas emissions from data centres’ electricity use will more than double between 2024 and 2030, and that data centres will consume more power than all but five countries by the end of the decade. AI-focused facilities are the fastest-growing slice of that demand — one widely cited tracker put their growth at roughly 50% in 2025 alone, against 17% for data centres overall.

The response from Big Tech has been, charitably, mixed. In the United States, Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta have struck major deals with fossil fuel operators to power their infrastructure, driving a surge of new gas plant investment. In China — the other global AI superpower — coal still supplies around 70% of the electricity that trains and serves models. Neither picture matches the “AI will solve climate change” narrative that executives like to tell on earnings calls.

There is also a transparency deficit. When UN Secretary-General António Guterres asked AI companies in June to reveal their full environmental impacts — emissions, water and energy use of their data centres — disclosure was partial at best. That failure is precisely the gap the Antalya Pledge aims to close, by making energy disclosure a condition of appearing on the COP’s action agenda rather than a favour granted to journalists and regulators.

Analysis: soft law, hard optics

Sceptics will note that a voluntary pledge with no draft text yet is thin gruel. The COP action agenda has a mixed record — high-profile commitments on coal and methane have moved billions of dollars and some policy, but plenty of announcements have evaporated after the closing press conference. A pledge that cannot compel a single company to install a meter has obvious limits.

Yet three things make this moment different from routine COP pageantry.

First, the timing matches a real bottleneck. AI’s constraint has shifted from chips to electricity. When projects stall from New York to Texas because grids and communities push back, energy disclosure stops being a reputational nicety and becomes siting strategy. Companies that cannot tell a county board exactly how many megawatts a campus will draw — and where they come from — will increasingly find permits harder to win.

Second, the ask is procedural, not ideological. The pledge does not demand degrowth or caps; it demands measurement and clean procurement. That is the kind of demand that is awkward to refuse and easy to verify when refused. A lab that publishes benchmark scores by the dozen but cannot publish its power draw invites exactly the scrutiny Stiell described.

Third, it creates a venue where AI governance meets climate governance. The UN’s AI panels have so far focused on safety and misuse; climate negotiators ignored AI entirely. The Antalya Pledge is the first formal bridge, and it arrives as both communities discover they are arguing about the same power plants.

The real test comes in November. If the draft pledge lands with concrete disclosure metrics — megawatt-hours reported, water use included, renewable percentages verified rather than aspirational — it could normalise energy transparency the way emissions reporting became table stakes for other industries. If it dissolves into vision language, it will join the long list of forgettable COP announcements, and the next fight over AI’s power bill will be held not in Antalya but in county zoning hearings.

Either way, the era of AI externalising its electricity costs without a public accounting is drawing to a close. The hosts of COP31 have made sure of that.