Data Center Growth is Putting our Sustainability Ambition at Risk – Together We Can Keep Both on Track

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The tension between our growth and sustainability ambitions

In the fight against climate change, the data center industry is led by some of the most ambitious companies in the world. The internet giants’ decarbonization commitments have set the pace not just for the tech industry, but for the entire private sector. Under the Climate Pledge that they co-founded, Amazon has committed to achieving net zero by 2040. Google has set a goal to achieve net zero emissions by 2030, and Microsoft has a plan to be carbon negative by the same date. The colocation providers that host massive digital loads for these giants are working to keep up, with many setting their own carbon neutrality and next zero goals.

In addition to being one of the most environmentally ambitious, the data center industry is also one of the fastest growing. Driven by the proliferation of AI training and inference workloads, the growth of our industry is no longer limited by demand – it is limited only by the availability of power, land and equipment. The breakneck pace of building is contributing to growing tension between growth and sustainability in our industry and may put our climate ambitions at risk.

Embodied carbon is at the heart of our sustainability climate challenge

In organizing the work of achieving these goals, it can be helpful to borrow the breakdown of Emissions Scopes from the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.

Scope 1 emissions are those generated inside the data center fence – the vast majority of which come from diesel backup generators. These emissions make up a relatively small piece of overall emissions pie for a data center, and there is work underway to replace diesel generators with cleaner alternatives.

Scope 2 emissions are those that come from purchased power, either from the utility or a power purchase agreement. Hyperscale data center operators have led not just with ambition in this category, but with action. Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft were all among the top 10 purchasers of renewable energy in the world in 2023.

Scope 3 is the big, hairy, ‘everything else’ category of emissions, and can include everything from employee travel to the generation of waste. The majority of many data center operators’ carbon footprint is now in Scope 3 and is made up almost entirely of the embodied carbon of the equipment and materials that go into building their data centers.

We need to work together to measure, report on, and reduce embodied carbon

So, if the biggest part of the biggest part of the emissions challenge that remains is embodied carbon, what exactly is it, and how do we make it go away?

“Embodied carbon” refers to all the emissions generated in creating and delivering equipment and materials to the data center gate, including those associated with extracting and processing raw materials, manufacturing a finished product, and transporting it to site.

The first step in decarbonizing all these upstream processes is transparency. Data center operators need their suppliers to measure and report on embodied carbon, and to do so in a consistent, high-quality manner that can give the operator confidence in the dataset they are building.

Schneider Electric is helping to lead several related industry efforts to drive this transparency.

The iMasons Climate Accord was convened in 2022 with an explicit mission to drive down emissions from the equipment, materials, and power that go into building and operating a data center. The working groups under the Accord have produced case studies comparing methods for measuring and reporting on embodied carbon. Recently, the members of the Accord’s Governing Body: Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Digital Realty and Schneider Electric, released a joint letter in support of the most thorough and standardized of these methods, an Environmental Product Disclosure (EPD) based on a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA).

The Open Compute Project established Sustainability as its fifth guiding tenant in 2022 and has since then established several sub-projects and working groups to advance the measurement and reporting of embodied carbon, including an active workstream focused on carbon modeling for IT equipment.

OCP / iMasons Joint Project on Carbon Disclosure: With an understanding that Scope 3 emissions and embodied carbon are a collective problem, these two organizations came together last year in formal partnership and launched a joint project on carbon disclosure. The goal of this project is to leverage the strengths of each organization, and to ensure the work being on done on this problem has the greatest impact.

The joint project is led by Microsoft, Google, Meta and Schneider Electric, and has a mission to encourage more suppliers to take the first step toward reduction by measuring and reporting on the embodied carbon of their products, and to encourage data center builders to include carbon disclosure as part of their supplier engagement.

The challenge is too great for one of us, but not for all of us.

The sheer scope of this ambition is bound to generate skepticism, and we will never be short of voices arguing that it can’t be done, or that the companies who have made these commitments have won’t make the investments necessary to achieve them. At Schneider, we have seen firsthand just how serious these companies are about staying on track. But none of our companies can do it alone. Only through taking the plunge collectively will we succeed – sharing insights and effort, volunteering our time, and cooperating with suppliers, regulators, investors, customers, and competitors alike.

To get involved, please check out the iMasons Climate Accord, the Open Compute Project Sustainability Project, and the many other complimentary efforts currently underway around the world. We’ll see you there.