Google buys green steel certificates for its data centres

What has Google agreed to?

Google is buying environmental attribute certificates for up to 91,000 metric tons of steel from Stegra's first year of production, a deal the company says will help lower the carbon footprint of the data centres it builds. The agreement, announced on Google's blog on 17 September, ties the search giant to a plant in Boden, northern Sweden, that is meant to become the world's first large-scale, near-zero emissions steel works.

The post is credited to Ben Townsend, Google's head of infrastructure strategy and sustainability, and Jenna Stauffer, its head of strategic priorities for climate operations. Neither the value of the certificates nor the data centres they are meant to cover is disclosed in the announcement.

What is Stegra doing differently?

Steelmaking is one of the dirtiest things heavy industry does. Traditional mills burn coal to strip oxygen out of iron ore, and Stegra reckons the steel industry on its own accounts for more than 7% of global carbon dioxide emissions. Its plant at Boden uses renewable electricity to make green hydrogen and reacts that hydrogen with iron ore instead, a process whose main by-product is steam.

Stegra estimates that swapping coal for hydrogen can cut production emissions by up to 95% compared with a traditional blast furnace, and it calls Boden Europe's first new steel mill in 50 years and the largest green hydrogen production plant on the continent. Google says the steel is designed to meet the International Energy Agency's definition of near-zero emissions steel production.

The plant is being finished rather than imagined: Stegra's own timeline records the direct reduced iron tower at Boden reaching its final height of 145 metres in June 2026, and a freight agreement with Green Cargo signed the same month.

Why does a hyperscaler care about steel?

Data centres are concrete and steel long before they are servers. Google says buying into low-carbon materials helps it tackle the embodied carbon locked into its buildings, and estimates the shift can cut embodied carbon emissions from data centre infrastructure by up to 40%. In 2025 the company says it used low-carbon concrete, steel or a combination of the two in over 20 construction projects, and it sits on the Sustainable Steel Buyers Platform, a coalition of buyers pressing suppliers for greener material.

The catch: certificates are not steel

Environmental attribute certificates are financial instruments. Google is paying for the environmental credentials attached to a slice of Stegra's output, not for that steel to be delivered to a building site; the metal itself can be sold to somebody else. The purchase drives demand and helps a first-of-a-kind plant through its expensive early years, which is the point of the exercise, but it also means Google's own sites will not be visibly greener next quarter.

The 40% figure is Google's own estimate and applies to infrastructure the company has not built yet, while the 95% figure comes from the plant's owner rather than an independent assessment.

What happens next

Stegra still has to ramp up a plant that has never produced steel at this scale, and neither company has put a date or a price on deliveries. Google frames the certificates as one step in a longer shift towards buying low-carbon materials, with more than 20 projects already behind it. For Europe, whose steel industry is expensive to run and hard to clean up, the more useful signal is that a company with Google's balance sheet is willing to pre-pay for the least glamorous part of the transition: the first tonnes out of a brand-new plant.

Our opinion

The interesting thing here is not the steel. It is the accounting. Google is not buying green metal to bolt into a data hall; it is buying the environmental paperwork attached to it, and paying a premium for early demand. That sounds like an odd way to fight climate change until you notice the alternative: nobody buys the paperwork, the plant cannot finance its first years, and the industry keeps burning coal because the clean version is still more expensive.

Google's numbers deserve the same scepticism any company's self-reported figures get. A 40% cut in embodied carbon from data centre infrastructure is an estimate about buildings that do not exist yet, and the 95% figure belongs to Stegra, not to a peer-reviewed study. Certificates also carry a credibility problem: they are only worth something if the underlying claim is real and is not counted twice, and buyers have been burned before.

Even so, it is not an accident that this landed in Sweden rather than in a press release about a pilot project. Europe's heavy industry is costly to run and awkward to decarbonise, and the continent has spent years waiting for a template that works. Somebody has to be the first customer willing to pay for the first tonnes. It may as well be the company that needs the steel, the electricity and an awful lot of concrete.