Big Tech’s vaunted data center energy efficiency gains were not what they seemed. Despite substantial progress between 2007 and 2018, energy efficiency didn’t actually improve much after that. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta more than doubled their energy demand between 2017 and 2021. Driven by AI, emissions figures from data centers were expected to double, treble or quadruple by 2030. Were AI-driven data centers adding a Germany-worth or a Japan-worth of electricity every couple of years? Was one data center using as much electricity as three million people? Did new data centers come with nuclear power plants attached?

“Something unusual is happening in America,” The New York Times reported. “Demand for electricity, which has stayed largely flat for two decades, has begun to surge.” In little old Ireland, by the early 2020s, data centers were consuming over 20% of Irish electricity, more than every city, town and village in the country.

Data centers often have an even bigger impact on electricity use in a region than the actual electricity they use, because of a practice called ‘air bookings’, where Big Tech locks up future electrical capacity just in case it needs it. This blocks development in the local area. In Skåne, Sweden, for example, “Microsoft booked so much electricity from the grid in the Malmö region that the local Swedish bread company Pågen could no longer build a bread-baking factory in the area and had to expand elsewhere,” said Julia Velkova, assistant professor at the University of Helsinki.

All this surge in data center electricity demand meant that coal plants were being kept in service longer, while oil, gas and nuclear stocks were booming. In the USA, “residents in the low-income, largely minority neighborhood of North Omaha celebrated when they learned a 1950s-era power plant nearby would finally stop burning coal,” Evan Halper wrote for The Washington Post. The good news didn’t last long because of the explosive growth of data centers. The same happened in Georgia, where “one of the country’s largest electric utilities, Southern Company, made a splash when it announced it would retire most of its coal-fired power plants,” Emily Jones wrote for Grist. However, because of an “extraordinary spike in demand for electricity” driven by data center growth, they too had to cancel their plans.

Even the data centers that claimed to use wind, solar or hydro energy had ‘backup’ diesel generators that were getting used more and more as their frenzied growth maxed out local electricity grids. Some were also questioning how Big Tech was monopolizing wind, solar, etc., that could instead be used to help homes and local businesses move away from fossil fuels. “For a lot of individuals and politicians, the fact that we use energy from newly constructed wind parks for the benefit of hyper-scale data centers feels out of balance,” explained Julia Krauwer, a technology analyst at Dutch bank ABN Amro.