Data centers are as integral to modern life as running water or electric lights, but we are only just coming to terms with their enormous environmental impacts.
Most of our day-to-day activities now require the use of a data center, from sending emails and messages, attending online meetings, to streaming entertainment, finding your way around using online maps, social media browsing, and online shopping. The side effect of these conveniences has been a massive increase in energy consumption since the dawn of the internet, accompanied by increased carbon emissions, water depletion, and biodiversity loss. Demand for data centers is only increasing with every passing day: data center energy consumption is expected to double by 2030 (IEA, 2025).
It is too late now to go back to the pre-internet age. So, if we cannot stop using data centers, how do we mitigate their impacts on the world we have to live in?
The Environmental Impacts of Data Centers
Emissions
In 2024, data centers consumed 1.5% of global electricity, or 415 billion kWh. With a global grid mix of 473 gCO2e/kWh, that’s almost 200 million tonnes of CO2 – in a single year.
More energy consumption means greater carbon emissions. Data centers generate carbon emissions through their consumption of electricity: every interaction an individual has with the internet sends a request to a data center, which is processed via physical hardware, which draws power. Most data centers draw their power from the local grid, just like homes and businesses. With a global grid mix – the proportion of power generating sources that supply power to a grid – that is still more than 50% reliant on fossil fuels, and the demand for digital services only expanding, data centers are consuming carbon-intensive electricity at an ever-increasing rate.
Water
The average data center consumes 2 million liters of water every day – as much as 6,500 homes.
The electricity that powers the hardware in data centers generates a lot of heat, which causes the hardware to shut down if not effectively dissipated. To resolve this, data centers must be constantly supplied with millions of liters of water, using evaporative cooling to keep the hardware at a constant temperature. This drains local water supplies and contributes to water scarcity in many regions, as unlike residential water consumption, 80% of the water consumed by data centers is evaporated and cannot therefore be recycled back into the local supply.
Biodiversity
The average data center requires 9,000 square meters of land to be concreted over.
Despite increases in hardware efficiency, there is a direct relationship between the demand for digital services and the physical size of data centers: more demand means more servers, which means more floorspace. The number of data centers worldwide is expected to increase by 57% over the next three years, with ambitious construction projects planned in every continent. This reduces the biodiversity of every region in which a data center is constructed, by destroying natural habitats and disrupting local ecosystems.
So, What Can We Do?
Embrace Digital Sobriety
Digital services should be treated no differently from digital devices. It is well recognized that a laptop left idling is a waste of energy, but we rarely apply the same principle to our internet use. We therefore need to transform our approach to digital services, by becoming responsible consumers and designers. As consumers, we should try to limit the number of requests that need to be processed via data centers by simply spending less time on the internet and using fewer energy intensive processes, such as AI or video streaming. As designers, we must promote energy efficiency as a principle of software development.
Migrate to Low-Carbon Data Centers
If we understand the emissions our use of digital services are generating, we are better placed to reduce them. Tailpipe calculates the carbon emissions produced by an organization’s use of cloud services, by assessing the energy consumption of the hardware that hosts the cloud. Tailpipe can then suggest ways of reducing an organization’s cloud emissions, by migrating services to data centers that are connected to energy grids that primarily utilize renewable energy.
To find out more about how to measure and reduce your cloud emissions, get in touch with the Tailpipe team here.
Increase the Efficiency of Data Centers
The energy efficiency of data centers is measured by Power Usage Effectiveness, or PUE. PUE represents the percentage of energy consumed by a data center that is not used by the servers. A score of 1 would represent 100% of the energy being consumed by servers, rather than cooling, lighting, and other overheads. In the 2010s, data center design prioritized energy efficiency to slash the average PUE from 2.5 to 1.5, but that figure has flatlined since 2018. However, because efficiency usually guarantees cost savings, the largest Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) have been pioneering the development of energy efficient data centers in recent years: Amazon Web Service’s (AWS) data centers have an average PUE of 1.15, whilst Google Cloud Platform (GCP) manages 1.09, and Microsoft Azure runs at 1.18. If global data centers can follow this lead, the energy requirements of global data centers will once again drop, reducing emissions in turn.
Similarly, the largest data center operators are tackling the issue of water consumption in their facilities with a range of water efficiency measures. These include new cooling technologies, rainwater harvesting, and the use of wastewater and treated sewage rather than clean water. All the Big Three CSPs (AWS, Azure, and GCP) have committed to becoming ‘water positive’ by 2030, returning more fresh water to the supply than they consume.
Increase Global Renewable Energy Coverage
Even with energy efficiency schemes in place, data centers that use fossil fuel energy will continue to generate carbon emissions in some form. The only way to cut these remaining emissions is for data centers to switch to 100% renewable power sources – or, at least, to increase their utilization of them.
The Big Three CSPs all currently match 100% of their energy consumption from fossil fuels by investing in renewable energy projects around the world. Whilst their investments in renewable energy projects should be commended, energy matching does nothing to decrease the impact of the actual emissions produced when data centers draw power from fossil fuel combustion. To tangibly reduce the emissions of data centers, CSPs must invest in renewable energy infrastructure in the grids they source from or prioritize the development of new data centers in countries with low-carbon grids, such as Brazil, Sweden, and Canada.
The data center industry is one of just three sectors that is projected to increase, rather than decrease, its total emissions into 2030 (IEA, 2025). It is vital that both consumers and providers of digital services respond to this by recognizing the digital world’s environmental impact – and taking action to mitigate and reduce it.
