Hi Watchers!
This is post #2 giving the groundwork why the world’s online computing has a resource and environmental cost.
IT equipment that powers the internet drives carbon emissions and water use. The data centers that store, compute, and deliver cloud services are vast buildings with extremely high-capacity internet connections running millions of pieces of information technology hardware and software. Data centers consume large amounts of electrical power and water to operate and cool densely packed racks of IT equipment that gets replaced.
When they consume electricity from power plants burning fossil fuels, they contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. When they pull millions of gallons of water a day from municipalities and aquifers, they cause alarm in their communities. And they generate electronic waste when equipment gets upgraded.
Cloud computing platforms let customers use data center resources remotely as their own virtual data center. While cloud users don’t operate the IT hardware, they still cause real-world data centers to emit greenhouse gas from power consumption. They also contribute to the cloud data center’s use of 500,000 to 2+ million gallons of drinking water a day.
Use and demand are growing across the board. Consumers use streaming and social media, and businesses are putting their IT “up in the cloud” with large amounts of data processing and backups. Complex new cloud applications, such as generative AI (GenAI), add complexity with unknown implications.
GenAI applications use up electrical power in much larger quantities. We will discuss AI in depth in another post, but put simply its market adoption rate and technology evolution show concerning potential to drive up data center greenhouse gas emissions and water use at an unprecedented rate.
The largest data center operators, known as hyperscalers, run the most efficient facilities. Their power and water use are much smaller per computing activity than smaller data centers run by companies for themselves. Every organization that discontinues running on-premise or rented colocation data centers and migrates to the cloud improves its sustainability.
Professionally run data centers are the most power-efficient and carbon-efficient method of delivering the world’s computing at this time. McKinsey & Company’s 2023 report “Cloud-powered technologies for sustainability” estimates that in 2050, cloud usage will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 1.5GtCO2e annually compared to staying with existing data center decisions.
In future posts we will discuss the trends driving cloud computing’s sustainability and how both users and technology developers can minimize the environmental impact of our online lives.