For years, energy efficiency was the great big shining bright green fabulously good spinning story of the Big Tech data center love of and care for the environment. This was quite a feat of PR spinning, when you consider that a small area of a data center in the 2020s had more power than all of available computing around 1980, and that the electricity demand per square meter can be 50–100 times greater than for a normal office building. Despite this, the story was spun from the early 2000s that while data was exploding, the quantities of energy required to run these data centers were not growing at anywhere near the same pace. Added to that, whatever energy was needed was renewable, and we all know that renewable energy has zero cost to the environment. Don’t we? So all’s good in techland. The Efficiency Bros have come riding to the rescue yet again! Data centers were super energy efficient, and getting more efficient every year, to the point where they would soon dematerialize and become invisible. Wo huw!
Behind the scenes, Big Tech worked very hard to manipulate, lie, greenwash, scam and spin like a trumpista, as it piled on the creative, innovative accounting. “Data center emissions were probably 662% higher than big tech claims,” Isabel O’Brien wrote for The Guardian in 2024. Here’s a quote from Isabel:
“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.”
The way data centers measure electrical energy usage is through what is called Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). The closer the PUE is to 1, the more “efficient” the data center is. Let us park for a moment the awkward truth that improvements in technological efficiency have rarely if ever led to overall reductions in energy use—quite the total opposite, actually. Park that nasty thought for a moment. Here’s another nasty thought to park. Much of the PUE efficiency gains were achieved by massively increasing the use of water for cooling. Another way was by massively churning through computer servers and creating mountains of e-waste. Energy use was “being reduced by just throwing more material at the problem,” Johann Boedecker, founder of the circular economy consultancy Pentatonic, told the Financial Times. Data centers became one of the prime sources of e-waste as they dumped perfectly good working servers, chasing that new server with that slightest of slightest gains in energy efficiency. Again, we see how vital it is not to focus on CO2 as a single metric. CO2 is the ace of hearts in a 52-card deck of pollution and environmental damage. We must measure the total long-term cost to the environment—to the water, the air, the soil, the biodiversity, the climate—for at least seven generations out.