Uncolonized Futures: Big Tech's AI Infrastructure and the Rhetoric of Climate Deferral

Abstract

This paper explores how six major technology companies: Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, Google, and Meta address the environmental implications of their artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure through their discourse in different genres of official documents. The research draws on corporate texts, including sustainability reports, executive keynotes, shareholder letters, and regulatory filings, along with independent evidence from non-corporate sources. The research investigates three questions. First, it examines how rhetorical strategies vary by communication genre and target audience. Second, it assesses how temporal deferral functions as a means of legitimation across the dataset. Finally, it evaluates whether discursive confidence enabled by temporal deferral correlates with weaker material emissions performance across the sample. Utilising inductive discourse analysis grounded in sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009, 2015); the sociology of expectations (Brown & Michael, 2003; Borup et al., 2006); and Crawford's (2021) materialistic critique of computation, the findings indicate a consistent dual narrative structure: an outward-looking promissory register (performed primarily through keynote addresses and shareholder letters) that represents AI as an active ecological actor, and an inward-looking defensive register (limited to regulatory filings) that re-classifies those same obligations as non binding legal risks. Further comparative analysis of this two-register structure against the 2020-2024 emissions trajectories for each corporation indicates a striking asymmetry. Building on prior use of the term"technowashing"(Perakslis, 2020; Ribeiro & Soromenho-Marques, 2022), this paper refines this concept within climate-AI discourse by analyzing its reliance on uncolonized future times where Big Tech uses speculative promises about a future humans have not reached yet to shape the present debate (Brown & Michael, 2003). It argues that this temporal deferral does not merely exaggerate claims; rather, it allows AI-driven promissory discourse to expand alongside rising rates of material extraction, rather than emissions being reduced by tech solutions.