Morgan Stanley forecasts that the surge in large-scale data centers will significantly increase their emissions, reaching levels comparable to those of India. This rise in emissions is driven by the growing demand for cloud services and artificial intelligence.
With 2.5 GtCO2eq in emissions, data centres will become the 4th largest polluter in the world
Driven by artificial intelligence and cloud-based services, data center emissions are expected to exceed 2.5 billion tons of CO2 equivalent (GtCO2eq) by the decade’s end. These infrastructures are on the verge of becoming the world’s top polluters, contributing a share of global emissions comparable to that of a country like India.
This estimate comes from Morgan Stanley and outlines a completely unsustainable trajectory about the Paris Agreement goals. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), in 2021 global data centers accounted for 0.9-1.3% of final electricity demand, a 60% increase compared to just six years earlier. Based on these emission levels, the Agency calculates that emissions would need to be halved by 2030 to return to a net-zero trajectory.
The Role of Big Tech
Most data center emissions are tied to a handful of large tech companies. Giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon alone already represent 60% of all global large-scale data center capacity (“hyperscale”), typically with over 5,000 servers. As of early 2024, we have surpassed the milestone of 1,000 hyperscale data centers, with just over half of them located in the United States.
This year, Google announced that its emissions have increased by 48% over the past five years, mainly due to the boom in AI-related data centers. In 2023 alone, Google’s data centers consumed 24 TWh of electricity, about 10% of the total used by data centers worldwide. Since 2020, Microsoft’s emissions have also risen by 30%, driven by the expansion of its data centers.
