WASHINGTON— A fossil-fueled surge in U.S. data center growth to serve the artificial intelligence boom threatens to sabotage the country’s already faltering climate goals, according to Data Crunch, a report released today by the Center for Biological Diversity.
A massive expansion of data centers, set to be powered primarily by fracked gas, could account for 10% of the economy-wide emissions and 44% of the power sector emissions allowable to meet the U.S. 2035 climate target, known as the nationally determined contribution, or NDC. Data centers are projected to account for more than 12% of U.S. electricity consumption by 2030.
To meet the NDC — set by President Biden and still in effect under Paris Agreement’s terms — all other electricity-consuming sectors would need to increase their carbon-emissions cuts by 60% to account for data centers’ massive fossil-fueled pollution.
The report comes ahead of next month’s COP30 climate talks in Brazil as countries’ plans to address climate change are falling far short of what’s needed. The Trump administration is attacking climate progress and pushing for a fast-tracked AI data center boom fed by gas and coal.
“Trump is determined to feed the voracious AI vortex with more dirty fossil fuels that harm the whole world,” said Jean Su, energy justice director at the Center and co-author of the report. “This report shows how the U.S. is about to set off an explosion of dirty data center emissions, entrenching more fossil fuels when we need their rapid phaseout. We need meaningful guardrails at every level to ward off this huge threat to our air, water and climate — and guard against energy price spikes for consumers.”
The report spotlights the U.S. role as the biggest AI climate polluter, with the planet’s highest concentration of data centers.
If the projected AI surge was instead powered fully by renewables, it would account for only 4% of the power sector emissions and a negligible amount of the economy-wide emissions allowable to meet the United States’ 2035 climate target.
Powering data center development with gas and coal risks entrenching dirty energy and its attendant harms, from air pollution to heatwaves and superstorms. It retreats from the 2023 Dubai climate summit agreement to transition away from fossil fuels and is completely incompatible with the 2035 U.S. climate goal.
“Feeding data centers with fossil fuels is taking the climate crisis we have now and blowing it up like the Incredible Hulk,” said John Fleming, Ph.D., a scientist at the Center’s Climate Law Institute and co-author of the report. “A gas-fed AI boom is going to hurdle us past any chance of keeping to our climate goal or maintaining a safe and healthy future for our planet. To the extent that data center buildout is needed at all, it should be powered only by clean, renewable energy.”
The report finds that guardrails are needed at global and national levels to curb data centers’ immense climate emissions, including adoption of a public-interest framework on permitting decisions and requiring on-site and distributed renewable energy and storage for power generation on a U.S. domestic level.
The United Nations recently launched two bodies addressing AI’s global governance, but neither explicitly deal with the industry’s potential climate and environmental harms. The report urges the UNFCCC to incorporate AI’s climate emissions into NDC reporting and consider other mechanisms for zeroing out its climate impacts.
