We live in the cult of the cloud, of the cloud. We have come to believe that everything is light, airy, and weightless. The information? They are on the net. The machines? Someone else runs them. The charges? But no, all is covered. Sure. Every digital motion, every saved file, every watched video, and every queried question of artificial intelligence requires energy. And not a little. In 2023, global data centres consumed 460 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity, says the International Energy Agency (IEA). That is 1.8 per cent of the world’s electricity consumption. In 2026, the figure will double to almost 1,000 TWh.
The cloud giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) alone operates more than 125 data centres worldwide. One can consume as much as 100 megawatts in use, the equivalent of a city of 80,000 people. Ireland’s data centres currently consume 18% of Ireland’s total electricity supply, 5% in 2015. In 2030, it is expected to consume over 30%. Meanwhile, Meta (Facebook) built a building in Denmark that occupied up to 150,000 homes. Google, in Oregon (The Dalles), has requested access to 25% of the whole city’s water supply – just to cool its servers. Electronic energy hunger is ubiquitous. Bitcoin mining, according to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, consumed 143 TWh in 2022. More than Argentina (121 TWh) or Norway (124 TWh). It costs some 1,173 kWh of power per Bitcoin transaction, which is the same as 100,000 credit transactions. And here is a surprise: roughly 300,000 transactions each day: far from the money of tomorrow, it is one big oven all day long, operating day and night, oftener than not fueled by coal in the likes of Kazakhstan or Iran.
AI is doing worse
Artificial Intelligence, however, is delivering the deepest damage. GPT-3 training alone took over 1,287-megawatt hours and created over 550 tones of CO₂. The same as driving a private aircraft from London to San Francisco 300 times. And GPT-4 is ten times the size. AI on its own, it’s reckoned, could use more than 80 TWh each year in training alone by the year 2027. Every request to ChatGPT uses 2 to 4 Wh, but a Google search only uses 0.3 Wh. If hundreds of millions of people submit hundreds of millions of requests daily, the math is straightforward: a new station is merely required to respond to our questions. And then there is our beloved hobby: video streaming. Netflix, YouTube, Prime Video, TikTok. Streaming in 2022 took up 65% of world internet traffic. One hour of Netflix viewing in HD will use 0.2-0.4 kWh. Billions of hours a day: that is 300 million tons of CO₂ per year, says The Shift Project. In blunt terms, the same as Spain produces annually.
YouTube is also an invisible behemoth: 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute; every day, more than 30 million gigabytes. The energy cost of this activity is about 11 million tons of CO₂ per year – just YouTube. TikTok? The same, but in shorter, more addictive video loops. If the cloud is a cloud, then it is a black cloud. In the meantime, the external world adapts. Microsoft buys entire wind farms in Sweden. Google invests in Icelandic geothermal power plants. Amazon negotiates to capture solar power in the Emirates. The digital giants are turning into energy giants, and they march ahead in giant steps, geopolitically, neo-colonial. They plunder lands, they step in where energy is affordable and public voice is less valuable.
We are the last paradox
And us? We smile at the umpteenth green innovation commercial, but in the meantime, we never turn off our Wi-Fi, we have thousands of photos in the cloud, we ask voice assistants to tell us about the weather in Tokyo. We think that we are digital citizens but that we are unconscious consumers of electricity. And every move is billed by someone. Someone else, somewhere else on the planet. We need a culture of boundaries. To know, to quantify, to educate. Schools need to talk about the digital footprint the way they talk about the ecological footprint. Every educator needs to educate children that a viral video has an effect, that an AI is not impartial, and that behind every bit, there is a kilowatt-hour somewhere. And that the future is constructed not only with data but also with accountability. Because while it is undoubtedly true that we are a globalised world, it is also true that every single connection has a cost. And if we do not become better at meeting this cost – energetic, social, environmental – then we will wake up to global darkness and discover too late that digital, as it stands, is barely sustainable at all.
