The rise of Big Tech and AI

Hardly anyone I have spoken to who has used AI in their ethical businesses or campaign groups has not had a "wow" moment.

A moment when they were seriously impressed with the speed and quality of what was returned, and the time that this had saved to spend on other tasks. (Of course they have also had moments of disappointment where rubbish returns have resulted.)

And yet, we appear to be living in chaotic times. Multiple wars and crises surround us. Divisive language and misinformation is everywhere, and people report higher than usual anxiety about the future.

Against this backdrop we have witnessed the extraordinary rise of just a few technology multinationals to become the biggest companies on the planet. 

And, in the last two years, we have watched as these multinationals have rolled out new "AI tools" and features faster than breathless newsrooms can report on them.

Tech companies dominate the global market

As of May 2026, eight of the ten largest companies in the world (based on market value) were tech companies.

By way of context, although a different measure, UK GDP was £3,600 bn in 2024.

Speaking out against AI

There are an increasing number of voices pointing out how these phenomena - multiple crises and the rise of Big Tech - might be interrelated. 

In the measured voice of the NGO Humane Tech: "This concentration of resources and economic gains amongst select corporations leads to asymmetric corporate power in society, where a handful of tech companies can exert more influence than entire nations. Ordinary individuals are left with no clear mechanism to influence how these products are being built and deployed. This renders the majority of society a passive participant in the age of AI and sets the stage for social unrest."

Or in the less measured tones of Patrick Galey from Global Witness: 

“We have a handful of years until our carbon budget is exhausted. To waste what little bandwidth we have left – when 750 million people worldwide lack access to electricity – assisting some of the richest men ever to hone their plagiarism bots would be a historic idiocy that future generations are unlikely to forgive today’s leaders for.”

Below we briefly explore some of the biggest ethical or existential threats, and how our guides and ratings try to address them.

Concern 1: Robot takeover

"Artificial Superintelligence" (ASI) is a name given to a theoretical point in the future where "machine intelligence" becomes smarter than "human intelligence". With one best-selling book on the subject entitled "If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies", the potential ethical implications are clearly non-trivial.

Although opinions vary widely on the likelihood of this point ever being reached, the precautionary principle would suggest that serious guardrails would make sense. One guardrail that seems obvious is preventing the development of military uses or, as campaigners prefer to call them, "Killer Robots".

For this reason, amongst others, Ethical Consumer has developed a special arms and military rating category for the the newest tech guides (AI tools, social media, search engines, and web browsers), and this is explored in more detail in aspecial feature on how Big Tech appears to have "fallen in love with" Big Military.

Concern 2: Who gets to eat?

With AI being a "general technology" with potential uses in almost any business sector, concerns about job losses and economic disruption are rife. As the Guardian put it, finding an answer to the question of "who gets to eat" is noticeably absent from most discussions on this topic.

Ethical Consumer and others have long written about how Big Tech companies have used tax havens and other artificial schemes to systematically avoid paying corporation taxes. Judging by the flow of cash, the AI future envisaged by many investors is clearly one where even more "economic value" is captured by Big Tech.

This would then appear to be a future with falling tax revenues and with increasing demand for social welfare.

Which doesn’t really add up. 

This is why our tax rating of companies in our guides, may be particularly useful to help choose less damaging companies in this context.

Big tech and tax avoidance

A report by TaxWatch found that seven large US-based technology groups made so much profit from selling to UK customers in 2021 that they should have paid around £2.8 billion in UK tax. Instead, it's estimated that around £753 million was paid in UK corporation tax and digital services tax, leaving a gaping hole of £2 billion UK tax avoided.

This £2 billion could have paid for public services, including health workers and teachers.

Ethical Consumer's research into Amazon estimated that it should have paid around £575 million in UK tax in 2024. But, because of Amazon’s aggressive tax avoidance strategies, it’s likely that only a tiny fraction of the amount that might be expected will be paid. Amazon’s owner, Jeff Bezos, has been the focus of campaigners who argue that the super-rich should pay more tax. His hiring of many parts of Venice for his wedding was met with resistance and calls for him and other billionaires to contribute more fairly to tax.

Alongside Amazon, Apple, Alphabet (Google’s owner), Meta, and Microsoft all score exceptionally badly for tax conduct in our ethical ratings.

Concern 3: Monopoly and the threat to democracy

There are three main ways in which Big Tech companies are being identified as a threat to democracy everywhere.

(a) As traditional monopolies

There are a number of campaign groups providing evidence on how Big Tech is undermining democracy. We talk about some of these in our Resiting Big Tech feature, which is part of our Challenging Corporate Power series.

This includes the chilling recent statistic that there are now more Tech lobbyists (890) in Brussels than MEPs (720).

Our company ethos ranking in our guides gives higher marks to companies with alternative, less profit-focused structures which are less likely to engage in these "regulatory capture" behaviours.

"We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both." US Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1941.

(b) As builders of tools for surveillance

Companies capturing information about people from their internet activity has allowed governments, politicians, and companies to target messages to specific people or groups in ways that appear manipulative. AI surveillance systems can also be used to impose oppressive rules on citizens more effectively.

We have devised a special digital privacy rating for the newest tech guides to help identify companies which do less of this.

(c) As amplifiers of disinformation and hate speech

There is compelling evidence that social media in particular can amplify content that is controversial and divisive over content that is accurate and dull. We struggled to find metrics that would allow us to construct a meaningful ranking on this subject for our guides. The absence of effective legal accountability is however another key driver of the desire to find social media alternatives.

Environmental issues with Big Tech and AI

Along with the issues noted above, the impact particularly of AI and data centres on the environment is becoming a global concern.

Energy costs of AI and Big Tech

Powering the internet uses a lot of energy. Every time someone looks something up in a search engine, it uses energy to find and present the results. Even more energy is used if browsers are storing this search data to share with advertising companies or to use for training AI tools.

The massive investment into AI developments gobbles up even more energy, and the UK’s prime minister has indicated that nuclear power plants may be built across the UK to help meet the rising energy demand from this.

Online information is stored in something known as the ‘cloud’, which is powered by massive data centres around the world – essentially huge warehouses with enormous amounts of computer technology.

These data centres consume huge amounts of electricity to power them and water to run their cooling systems to prevent the tech from overheating. A personal computer usually has a fan which will run every so often to stop your laptop from overheating. The same is needed for these massive data centres, on a very large scale.

The UK currently hosts around 500 data centres, the second highest of any nation globally, but up to 100 more could be built by 2030. According to a report on cloud and AI energy demands by Energy UK (the trade association for the energy industry), data centres currently use 1-2% of electricity in Great Britain. With the rapid expansion of AI, machine learning, and the Internet of Things, data centres are forecast to account for 10% of British electricity demand by 2050, the equivalent of more than 11 million homes.

Globally, the largest number of data centres is in the USA, followed by the UK, Germany, China, France and Australia. 

Although Ireland ‘only’ has 55 data centres at present, they are placing a huge strain on the island’s ability to meet the electricity demand to run them. According to the Energy UK’s ‘Powering the Cloud’ 2025 report, they currently use 21% of total Irish energy demand. Figures vary but this is projected to rise to 30% within 10 years based on currently planned data centres alone, with some reports suggesting that data centres in Ireland could alone use the same amount of power as every other electricity user in the country combined. 

Carbon emissions from data centres and the cloud

As well as consuming vast amounts of energy, the cloud and data centres produce carbon emissions which threaten to derail many climate targets. 

For example, researches suggest a 20% increase in energy use and a 13% rise in GHG emissions by 2030 due to data centres for Germany alone. For the UK, research by Carbon Brief suggests that emissions from new data centres could be hundreds of times higher than government estimates, especially if any gas is used to power them.

Our guide to streaming services reports that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the market leader in cloud computing services, with 31% of the global cloud market. Microsoft follows this with 24%, and then Google with 11%. Between them they account for 67% – meaning that they have massive energy demands.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), data centres and data transmission networks were responsible for 1% of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. However, with the expansion in data centres this is likely to already be higher, and Data Centre Magazine estimate that the current consumption of 460TWh (terawatt hours) electricity could rise to 1,000TWh in the near future, equivalent to Japan's entire annual energy consumption.

Unfortunately, most of the big tech companies are not using 100% renewable energy to power these energy demands and score poorly for climate policies. The IEA said that the four largest purchasers of corporate renewable energy power purchase agreements (Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft) contracted almost 50 GW of renewable energy in 2023, which they said was equal to the generation capacity of Sweden.

However, 50GW is a miniscule amount compared to what is being used, equivalent to only 2.5TWh, which is 0.5% of the usage in 2025.

Resisting and pushing back

Although at times the rise of unregulated Big Tech can feel unstoppable, if there is any consolation to be had it is in the identification of thousands of campaigns and projects that have sprouted up everywhere to resist and push back. 

These range from many smaller alternative providers identified in the newest tech guides (see search engines, web browsers, and social media guides for example), to the hundreds of NGOs, universities, governments and others identified in the Challenging Corporate Power feature.

Particularly encouraging have been the emergence of movements standing up against the rollout of new data centres and which may be a significant weak point in Big Tech's takeover plans. 

Digital sovereignty

Particularly in Europe, a growing number of government departments, and the European Parliament itself, are looking at ways of being less dependent on (US) Big Tech products and services. This rise in digital sovereignty is seen in public bodies switching away from monopolies like Microsoft to open source software and platforms.

Read more about digital sovereignty in our feature article on resisting big tech.

Stepping away and slowing down

With words such as "platform enshittification" and "doomscrolling" entering the language at pace, more people are also beginning to discuss the value of switching off from tech products – if not completely – then at least for parts of the day or week. 

This can be both for reasons of mental health and political resistance. We discuss this area in more detail in a special feature which has suggestions on how to digitally detox and find analogue alternatives.  

Practical ethical choices

The ubiquity and, in some cases, usefulness of Big Tech products means that on a practical level it will clearly be impossible for most people to walk away in protest tomorrow. Who doesn't love Google maps (at least some of the time)? And which workplaces don't contain some Microsoft or Google products?

And, as noted in the guide to AI tools, around 97% of young Brits are already using these products, and view them as completely normal. This does not mean that the only solution is to accept them as they are – unregulated and thrust upon everyone by unaccountable and, in some cases profoundly anti-social, multinationals.

In some sense, every use of their products cedes a tiny bit more power to them, and therefore conscious attempts at minimising engagement by millions of people can become important.

Something most of us could do in less than 30 minutes is switch the browser and search engine on our computer and phone in a few simple steps.

What can be done about energy use, AI and data centres?

A number of organisations are coming together to raise concerns about data centres, either to stop them from being built or calling for moratorium on planning permissions while the issues of energy, water and landuse are considered.

Find out more about these organisations on our page of profiles of campaigning organisations.

Intentional and efficient use of the internet 

Although our ethical broadband guide reports that using the internet isn’t likely to be a huge part of your carbon footprint, there are still ways we can reduce our energy use, even if by a small amount.

• Searches: bookmark regular websites you visit instead of using a search engine 

Every search made using a search engine will be using their energy banks. It’s estimated using bookmarks (or typing the url in directly if you know it) can cut browsing-related carbon emissions by 35%.

• Reduce use of AI bots 

AI uses even more energy. For example, a ChatGPT search requires around ten times more electricity than a standard internet search. Business Energy UK calculated that ChatGPT uses as much energy a day as could charge eight million phones.

Unfortunately, many search engines are now using AI to return results or create summaries. If you don’t want AI generated answers, use a search engine which (currently) doesn’t use them or enables you to turn them off. 

The search engine guide has more information on this. 

• Use web browsers that don't default to AI features

Web browsers are also increasingly applying AI features. Some of these can be turned off by the user, but there is concern that it will become harder to avoid AI when using the internet. 

Our web browsers guide highlights ones which are currently avoiding AI integrations.

Additional research by Alyson Tyler.