It’s a figure that big web companies have been carefully burying for years. The greenhouse gas emissions from server farms owned by Google, Apple, Meta and Microsoft are far higher than the companies claim. According to a recent Guardian investigation, the “cloud” of these 4 giants would emit 662% more CO2 than what is indicated in their balance sheet. Explanations.
A “creative compatibility” that hides carbon
In recent years, many large web companies have claimed that their data centers are, or will become, “carbon neutral“. Amazon welcomed this a few months ago, Google promises to achieve this goal by 2030, the same for Apple and Meta/Facebook. Except that, as an Amazon employee committed to the company’s ecological transition tells us, all these beautiful calculations are “of inventive accounting“, not to say biased.
The trick is quite simple, these companies hide the real emissions of their server farms behind figures adjusted to take into account their carbon offset credits. More precisely, these are the “green certificates” who are behind these little accounting arrangements. Allowing the purchase of volumes of clean electricity from renewable energy suppliers, these “good at polluting“allow on paper to”compensate“the actual CO2 emissions generated by companies.
This system, which has been widely criticized and on which the GAFAM are trying to exert all their influence in anticipation of future changes, therefore creates two indices: emissions “location based“, which measures the actual pollution of machines in CO2 equivalent, and the emissions”market based“, which takes into account green certificates sometimes purchased on the other side of the world. Unsurprisingly, web multinationals are more likely to display the second than the first.
A footprint 7.6 smaller than reality
By taking the differences in figures between these two indices one by one, the Guardian has therefore arrived at an emissions gap of 662%. To put it another way, Google, Meta, Apple and Microsoft declare CO2 emissions 7.6 times lower than what their servers actually generate. A figure that should give water to the mill of the ASL association which estimated, in a report published last August, that the current system encouraged companies to “underreport their emissions in their official reports […] and to exaggerate their investments in renewable energies“
Google, Meta, Apple and Microsoft report CO2 emissions 7.6 times lower than their servers actually generate
The most attentive will have noticed that Amazon is strangely absent from this calculation. Yet it is undoubtedly the company whose servers are churning the most. The Guardian claims that Apple’s emissions (the second largest polluter in this category) are more than two times lower than those of Amazon. But, due to its activity based among other things on renting servers to third parties, the raw emissions of Amazon’s machines are more difficult to calculate. Especially since the company plays with the different indicators to exclude half of its servers from its “operational control” and therefore its carbon footprint.
AI, the great reaper of carbon ambitions
The cherry on the CO2 cake is that data center emissions have increased significantly in recent years, and there’s no guarantee they’ll stop anytime soon. The race toward artificial intelligence has forced many large companies to scale back their carbon ambitions, as this technology is so greedy in terms of energy, water, and various materials.
According to GreenIT’s calculations, AI already represents in Europe “5% of the environmental impacts of data centers“and could increase”by 20 to 25% per year in the next decade“. The global warming potential of this activity is comparable to “22 billion kilometers in a thermal car, or 543,000 trips around the world“, says Frédéric Bordage, founder of GreenIT. An equivalence which surely explains why the GAFAM are desperately trying to hide their real carbon footprints.
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