CONNECT WITH SARAH

Data Centers – The Internet’s Sustainability Crisis

A man stands in front of a server while holding a costume mask in his hand.

By Sarah Ann Wu

The Internet’s carbon footprint appears to be growing exponentially. As the zettabytes of data created each year on the internet compound, so does the need for storage of that data, and developments in artificial intelligence are only adding to the demand for data storage.

Data Created Daily

An estimated 400 million terabytes of data are created on the Internet each day, with videos accounting for almost half of all web traffic, according to Fabio Duarte, a research associate with Exploding Topics, citing data from Statistica. And, 90 percent of all the data on the Internet was created in the last two years.
 
To illustrate this growth, 2 zettabytes of data were created globally in 2010, but in 2025 an estimated 181 zettabytes of data will be created. Not all this data is stored, but a lot of it is.

Data Centers and Energy Consumption

Data centers house companies’ servers, and these facilities consume a lot of electricity, most of which comes from local energy grids and fossil fuels, according to Jeff Kettle, a senior lecturer in electronic engineering at the University of Glasgow.
 
Kettle suggests that data centers could consider using renewable energy to reduce their carbon footprints. He said that about 40 percent of all companies in the United Kingdom generate some of their energy on site with renewable energy, such as wind or solar.
 
This statistic suggests an overwhelming culture of corporate responsibility in the U.K., but it may not be that simple. The movement toward renewable energy investments could also be motivated by efforts to reduce energy consumption costs. The U.K. has the highest energy prices in the developed world for businesses, according to Matt Oliver, an industry editor at The Telegraph.
 
Businesses in the United States pay about 1.7 cents less than the global average electricity price, according to statistics from Electric Rate. The U.S. also has so many more data centers than any other country, according to Cloudscene.

United States has the Most Data Centers

Click this triangle to see the 10 nations with the most data centers globally, according to statistics from Cloudscene.

The United States has the greatest number of data centers in the world. While some estimates suggest that the United States has 2,700 data centers, Cloudscene (via Exploding Topics) estimates double that figure.
CountryNumber of Data Centers
United States 5,426
Germany 529
United Kingdom 523
China 449
Canada 337
France
322
Australia 314
Netherlands 298
Russia 251
Japan 222

Three Large Data Centers on the East Coast

Digital Realty’s 60 Hudson in Manhattan, New York

60 Hudson Street in Tribeca, New York. Source: MusikAnimal via Wikipedia Commons

One of the top 10 largest data centers in the United States is in New York City’s Tribeca neighborhood at 60 Hudson Street. The 24-story building has 1.8 million square feet of floor space, and 164,000 square feet of that is dedicated to the data center. It is a hub for telecom carriers and network service providers. The data center has 80-125 watt per square foot power density, which seems a little on the low side, and 3.75MW of mission critical power. An average U.S. household uses 1 megawatt of power in about five weeks, according to Ecowatch.

Equinix NY4 in Secaucus

Equinix’s NY5 data center in Secaucus, N.J. (Equinix, Inc.)

Secaucus, New Jersey, is home to another massive data center, Equinix NY4. The facility has 18.5MW of mission critical power, and 151,772 data center space.

Equinix DC2 in Virginia

Another big data center on the east coast is in Ashburn, Virginia. Equinix DC2 is a 147,600 square feet facility about 30 miles away from Washington, D.C. It has seven transformers to power customers server racks on site, while also consuming power from DC’s grid. It has 5MW of mission critical power.

Individual Efforts to Reduce Emissions

What can Internet users and website designers do to reduce our carbon footprint? According to Jeff Kettle at the University of Glasgow, using fewer images and minimalist designs on a website can reduce the emissions caused by traffic to sites. Users’ locations and internet connections can also affect the emission calculation. 

Some web engineers have gone as far as using servers only powered by Solar to run their sites, for example, Low Tech Magazine, which sometimes become unavailable if the sunlight is lacking to power its servers. 

Website Carbon is one website that helps web users understand the amount of carbon dioxide emissions websites are causing. Kettle gives the example of the Google search engine browser page, which uses a minimalist design, and generates about 0.2g of carbon dioxide per visit. He compares this with a news website, the Daily Mail, which has a lot of images in its design. The website generates 54g of carbon dioxide per visit. 

Corporate Expansion and Sustainability Efforts

Given that Google receives about 5 billion visits to its site daily, according to Kettle, its website is responsible for 1 million kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions each day, while the Daily Mail, with its 300 million visitors daily, is responsible for about 16.2 million kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions each day. 

As internet consumers, should we aim to visit only sustainable websites? Or should the onus be on developers to develop lighter websites, or on storage companies to use cleaner energy?

Some big tech companies have announced that they are working on reducing carbon emissions by increasing the use of renewable energy. Equinix, which operates 270 data centers globally, has a page dedicated to sustainability data and its “green data centers,” which have things like green roofs, special cooling technology, or fuel cells on site. The development of artificial intelligence (AI) is only increasing the demand for data storage.

Google announced plans to shift all its data center facilities to renewable energy by 2030 back in 2021, but is still in the process of working toward that. It is raising capital with its partners in this project, Intersect Power and TPG Rise Climate, to build industrial parks in the U.S. that will each have gigawatts of data center capacity and corresponding clean-energy projects located on these sites to power the facilities. Google seeks to capitalize on the potential profits that AI is predicted to bring in coming years, according to Google’s president and chief investment officer Ruth Porat.

Works cited: