Sustainable Digital Infrastructure and Firm Productivity: A Quasi-Natural Experiment on China’s Green Data Center Pilot Program

The rapid growth of computing demand poses a material challenge to climate policy, making the productivity effects of green digital infrastructure an urgent empirical question. This study estimates whether China’s National Green Data Center Pilot Program, a policy bundling energy efficiency mandates with renewable energy procurement at the infrastructure layer, generates measurable firm-level effects on digital transformation and total factor productivity (TFP). This study treats the staggered rollout of the program across cities as a quasi-natural experiment and estimates its effect on listed firms using a two-way fixed effects difference-in-differences design over 2016 to 2023, complemented by event study analysis, placebo tests, instrumental variable diagnostics, heterogeneity robust estimators for staggered adoption, and mechanism and moderation analyses. The central finding is that pilot designation significantly accelerates firm-level digital transformation, measured by textual indicators of data value mining capability (p<0.01), which remains significant across specifications. Complementary evidence points to a modest positive effect on TFP, with an estimated increase of approximately 2.0 percent under the preferred city-level clustered specification, interpreted as suggestive evidence rather than the sole basis for inference. Exploratory mediation decomposition under the strong assumption of sequential ignorability indicates that digital transformation accounts for approximately 23.5 percent of the total effect, though this estimate should be treated as indicative rather than definitive. Mechanism-consistent analysis finds a marginally significant positive association with corporate ESG performance (p<0.10), while the association with green technology innovation is directionally positive but not statistically distinguishable from zero. Moderating effect analysis reveals that financing constraints and leverage significantly attenuate the productivity dividend, while public environmental concern provides a marginally significant amplifying effect (p<0.10). These results position green data center policy primarily as an upstream enabler of digital transformation that can generate productivity benefits when firms possess sufficient complementary investment capacity.