Data center emissions probably 662% higher than big tech claims. Can it keep up the ruse?

Emissions from in-house data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple may be 7.62 times higher than official tally

Guardian, Isabel O’Brien, 16 Sept 24

Big tech has made some big claims about greenhouse gas emissions in recent years. But as the rise of artificial intelligence creates ever bigger energy demands, it’s getting hard for the industry to hide the true costs of the data centers powering the tech revolution.

According to a Guardian analysis, from 2020 to 2022 the real emissions from the “in-house” or company-owned data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple are likely about 662% – or 7.62 times – higher than officially reported.

Amazon is the largest emitter of the big five tech companies by a mile – the emissions of the second-largest emitter, Apple, were less than half of Amazon’s in 2022. However, Amazon has been kept out of the calculation above because its differing business model makes it difficult to isolate data center-specific emissions figures for the company.

As energy demands for these data centers grow, many are worried that carbon emissions will, too. The International Energy Agency stated that data centers already accounted for 1% to 1.5% of global electricity consumption in 2022 – and that was before the AI boom began with ChatGPT’s launch at the end of that year.

AI is far more energy-intensive on data centers than typical cloud-based applications. According to Goldman Sachs, a ChatGPT query needs nearly 10 times as much electricity to process as a Google search, and data center power demand will grow 160% by 2030. Goldman competitor Morgan Stanley’s research has made similar findings, projecting data center emissions globally to accumulate to 2.5bn metric tons of CO₂ equivalent by 2030.

In the meantime, all five tech companies have claimed carbon neutrality, though Google dropped the label last year as it stepped up its carbon accounting standards. Amazon is the most recent company to do so, claiming in July that it met its goal seven years early, and that it had implemented a gross emissions cut of 3%.

“It’s down to creative accounting,” explained a representative from Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, an advocacy group composed of current Amazon employees who are dissatisfied with their employer’s action on climate. “Amazon – despite all the PR and propaganda that you’re seeing about their solar farms, about their electric vans – is expanding its fossil fuel use, whether it’s in data centers or whether it’s in diesel trucks.”

A misguided metric

The most important tools in this “creative accounting” when it comes to data centers are renewable energy certificates, or Recs. These are certificates that a company purchases to show it is buying renewable energy-generated electricity to match a portion of its electricity consumption – the catch, though, is that the renewable energy in question doesn’t need to be consumed by a company’s facilities. Rather, the site of production can be anywhere from one town over to an ocean away………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

2025 and beyond

Even though big tech hides these emissions, they are due to keep rising. Data centers’ electricity demand is projected to double by 2030 due to the additional load that artificial intelligence poses, according to the Electric Power Research Institute.

Google and Microsoft both blamed AI for their recent upticks in market-based emissions…………………………………………..

Whether today’s power grids can withstand the growing energy demands of AI is uncertain. One industry leader – Marc Ganzi, the CEO of DigitalBridge, a private equity firm that owns two of the world’s largest third-party data center operators – has gone as far as to say that the data center sector may run out of power within the next two years.

And as grid interconnection backlogs continue to pile up worldwide, it may be nearly impossible for even the most well intentioned of companies to get new renewable energy production capacity online in time to meet that demand. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/15/data-center-gas-emissions-tech