Data centers' energy consumption is expected to rise significantly over the next five years due to the accelerated growth of AI and its computational demands. Simultaneously, initiatives are underway to mitigate the environmental impact of the energy usage by replacing brown energy sources (e.g., coal) with green energy sources (e.g., solar), resulting in a projected decrease in grid carbon intensity. Yet, the interplay between these two contrasting forces on data centers' carbon emissions — a function of both energy consumption and carbon intensity — has not received much attention. In this paper, we analyze the operational carbon emissions of data centers at this crossroads, by considering the increasing data center energy consumption and the decarbonization of the electricity grid. In particular, we integrate publicly available current and future energy projections, consider multiple future scenarios, and provide a 5-year projection of datacenter carbon emissions at the global, US, and state levels. Our analysis shows that over the next five years, the rate of data center demand growth will overshadow the rate of grid decarbonization, with global (resp. US) emissions projected to rise by 4.2× (resp. 4.1×) in the worst case by 2030. Moreover, we observe considerable regional differences within the US, where emissions in some states could increase by up to 3.4× by 2030.
Maji et al. (Tue,) studied this question.