Actual Emissions From Google/Amazon/Apple In-House Data Centers May Be Nearly 8X "Official" Totals

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.

EDIT

For the firms that give data center-specific data – Meta and Microsoft – this holds true: data centers made up 100% of Meta’s market-based (official) scope 2 emissions and 97.4% of its location-based emissions. For Microsoft, those numbers were 97.4% and 95.6%, respectively. The massive differences in location-based and official scope 2 emissions numbers showcase just how carbon intensive data centers really are, and how deceptive firms’ official emissions numbers can be. Meta, for example, reports its official scope 2 emissions for 2022 as 273 metric tons CO2 equivalent – all of that attributable to data centers. Under the location-based accounting system, that number jumps to more than 3.8m metric tons of CO2 equivalent for data centers alone – a more than 19,000 times increase. A similar result can be seen with Microsoft. The firm reported its official data center-related emissions for 2022 as 280,782 metric tons CO2 equivalent. Under a location-based accounting method, that number jumps to 6.1m metric tons CO2 equivalent. That’s a nearly 22 times increase.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/15/data-center-gas-emissions-tech