Big Tech's datacentre emissions much higher than officially reported

Actual impact could be more than 600% higher than claimed

A new investigation has uncovered massive discrepancies in major tech companies' environmental claims.

Datacentres owned by Google, Apple, Microsoft and Meta could be emitting more than 660% more carbon than the companies officially report, according to the analysis by The Guardian.

The paper, which scrutinised datacentre emissions from 2020 to 2022, says their actual climate impact appears to have been vastly understated.

The report highlights a trend of "creative accounting" at the tech giants, allowing them to claim carbon neutrality despite a substantial environmental footprint.

These companies typically rely on renewable energy certificates (RECs) to offset emissions, but critics argue this practice is akin to greenwashing.

RECs are used to calculate "market-based" emissions. These take the purchase of renewable energy into account, even if the datacentres themselves continue to draw electricity from non-renewable sources.

In contrast, location-based emissions, which reflect the actual carbon output of the local grid supplying the datacentres, reveal a far more concerning picture.

For example, Meta, which officially reported emissions of 273 metric tons of CO2 in 2022, would see that figure skyrocket to more than 3.8 million metric tons under the more precise location-based method.

Similar discrepancies were found with Google, Microsoft and Apple, who have all been vocal about their carbon neutrality pledges.

Microsoft reported its official datacentre-related emissions for 2022 as 280,782 metric tons of CO2 equivalent (CO2e). However, using location-based accounting, the figure surges to 6.1 million metric tons — a nearly 22-fold increase.

"Location-based [accounting] gives an accurate picture of the emissions associated with the energy that's actually being consumed to run the data centre. And Uptime's view is that it's the right metric," says Jay Dietrich, the research director of sustainability at Uptime Institute, a datacentre advisory and research organisation.

Amazon, the largest emitter of the so-called "Big Five" tech companies, was excluded from The Guardian's analysis due to the complexity of isolating its datacentre emissions - an issue we have run into at Computing in our own emissions research.

Apple's emissions for 2022 amounted to less than half of Amazon's total, yet it was ranked as one of the highest emitters among tech firms.

The gap in reporting comes as datacentres' energy demands are expected to surge dramatically, driven in part by the AI revolution.

The launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT at the end of 2022 marked the beginning of an AI boom that has put even greater strain on these infrastructure systems.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), datacentres accounted for between 1% and 1.5% of global electricity consumption in 2022 – figures that preceded the AI explosion.

The introduction of systems like ChatGPT, which Goldman Sachs estimates require nearly 10 times as much electricity to process as a traditional Google search, is expected to send electricity demand soaring.

"Goldman Sachs Research estimates the overall increase in datacentre power consumption from AI to be on the order of 200 terawatt-hours per year between 2023 and 2030. By 2028, our analysts expect AI to represent about 19% of datacentre power demand," the investment bank predicts.

Despite their claims of environmental responsibility, the Big Tech firms have faced growing scrutiny for their emissions management strategies.

Google's 2020 environmental report revealed a 50% spike in the company's overall emissions compared to 2019, even though it continues to promote its green initiatives. Meanwhile, the company's electricity consumption from datacentres alone surged 17% in 2023. This trend shows no sign of slowing down as Google embeds AI more deeply into its services.

In light of the AI boom and the ever-growing energy needs of datacentres, researchers are calling for more transparency in how companies report emissions, and a shift towards the more realistic location-based accounting model.

Earlier this year, the European Commission approved a new mandatory reporting programme as part of the EU Energy Efficiency Directive (EED). The EED seeks to reduce energy consumption by 11.7% by 2030, contributing to the broader goal of cutting carbon emissions across Europe by 55% within the same timeframe.

Computing says:

The Guardian analysis is a welcome reminder of the research Computing has been conducting since 2021, which closely examines the environmental data published by the hyperscale cloud vendors.

In addition to the welcome discussion of the impact of third-party datacentre rental on scope 3 emissions (a common practice that only Google, of the Big Three hyperscalers, has even acknowledged occurs), the use of RECs for creative carbon accounting is a practice we have long argued should be more transparent.

We also advise any cloud consumer keen to understand more about the sustainability of the services they are buying to ask about the extent to which cloud providers utilise RECs in their accounting and reporting.

The GHG protocol allows this accounting but has indicated that rules need to be tightened. The subsequent lobbying from certain sectors provides a true indication of how much the wealth and power of the hyperscalers is used to dominate the REC market, then present this as a 'neutralisation' of their carbon emissions.

The new EU Energy Efficiency Directive will improve the efficiency of reporting in that jurisdiction, but if real change is to be made the US will have to be on board as GenAI stokes the demand for compute and power.