Artificial intelligence, cloud computing and data centres led to a spike in electricity demand between 2020 and 2023.
The United Nations’ digital agency says that operational carbon emissions for the world’s top tech companies rose an average of 150 percent between 2020 and 2023 as investments in artificial intelligence (AI) and data centres drove up global electricity demand.
Operational emissions for Amazon grew 182 percent in 2023 against 2020 levels, while emissions for Microsoft grew 155 percent, Facebook and Instagram owner Meta grew 145 percent, and Google parent company Alphabet grew 138 percent over the same period, according to the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
The figures include the emissions directly created by the companies’ operations as well as those from purchased energy consumption. They were included in a new report from ITU assessing the greenhouse gas emissions of the world’s top 200 digital companies between 2020 and 2023.
The UN agency linked the sharp uptick to recent breakthroughs in AI and the demand for digital services like cloud computing.
“Advances in digital innovation – especially AI – are driving up energy consumption and global emissions,” said Doreen Bogdan-Martin, who heads the ITU.
While these innovations mark dramatic technological breakthroughs, left unchecked, emissions from top-emitting AI systems could soon hit 102.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, the agency said.
“Currently, there are no standards or legislative requirements for companies to disclose their AI emissions or energy consumption, which makes understanding the impact of AI on company-level energy use less straightforward,” the report said.
“However, data from company reports show an increasing trend in operational emissions for companies with a high level of AI adoption.”
The AI and cloud computing boom has led to a similar spike in electricity demand from data centres, which help power digital services. Electricity consumption by data centres has grown 12 percent year-on-year since 2017, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Data centres alone consumed 415 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity – or 1.5 percent of global power demand. If the demand for data centres continues to grow at this pace, it will hit 945 TWh by 2030, surpassing Japan’s annual electricity consumption, according to the IEA.
Power-hungry digital companies, meanwhile, consumed an estimated 581 TWh of electricity in 2024, or roughly 2.1 percent of global demand, according to the report, although demand was highly concentrated among top firms.
According to data supplied by 164 out of 200 companies in the report, just 10 generated 51.9 percent of their electricity demand in 2023, the report said. They were China Mobile, Amazon, Samsung Electronics, China Telecom, Alphabet, Microsoft, TSMC, China Unicom, SK Hynix and Meta.
Publicly available emissions data for 166 out of the 200 companies revealed that they emitted 297 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year in 2023, the same as the combined emissions of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile.