Abstract Rising atmospheric CO₂ concentration ([CO₂]) enhances photosynthesis and reduces transpiration at the leaf, ecosystem, and global scale via the CO₂ fertilization effect. The CO₂ fertilization effect is among the most important processes for predicting the terrestrial carbon budget and future climate, yet it has been elusive to quantify. For evaluating the CO₂ fertilization effect on land photosynthesis and transpiration, we developed a technique that isolated this effect from other confounding effects, such as changes in climate, using a noisy time series of observed land-atmosphere CO₂ and water vapor exchange. Here, we evaluate the magnitude of this effect from 2000 to 2014 globally based on constraint optimization of gross primary productivity (GPP) and evapotranspiration in a canopy photosynthesis model over 104 global eddy-covariance stations. We found a consistent increase of GPP (0.138 ± 0.007% ppm⁻¹; percentile per rising ppm of [CO₂]) and a concomitant decrease in transpiration (−0.073% ± 0.006% ppm⁻¹) due to rising [CO₂]. Enhanced GPP from CO₂ fertilization after the baseline year 2000 is, on average, 1.2% of global GPP, 12.4 g C m⁻² yr⁻¹ or 1.8 Pg C yr⁻¹ at the years from 2001 to 2014. Our result demonstrates that the current increase in [CO₂] could potentially explain the recent land CO₂ sink at the global scale.