AI and net zero ambitions incompatible for countries, Cambridge report says

The idea that countries such as the United Kingdom can become global leaders in AI development while simultaneously meeting their net zero targets amounts to “magical thinking at the highest levels,” a new report says.

According to a study from the University of Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, the uncomfortable truth is that by 2040, the energy demands of the tech industry could be up to 25 times higher than today.

In fact, even the most conservative estimate for big tech’s energy needs will see a five-fold increase over the next 15 years.

That’s, of course, because AI needs ever larger data centers, and these are expected to create surges in electricity consumption that will strain power grids and actually accelerate carbon emissions.

That’s also why the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s promise that London can both lead in AI and meet its legal net zero commitments by 2050 “represents magical thinking at the highest levels of government,” explains the report.

The case of the UK is especially telling because in the Kingdom, housing has long been a sore issue. 50,000 families are currently waiting for homes that can’t be built due to grid capacity constraints – but the tech giants still quietly demand vast new power allocations for AI data centers.

“The moment when magical thinking meets grim reality for the UK is coming sooner than most people realise. It will arrive when it dawns on the public that every megawatt allocated to AI data centers will be a megawatt that is not available for housing, manufacturing, or other ‘growth’ priorities of the current administration,” says the report.

At the moment, data centres – the facilities that house servers for processing and storing data, along with cooling systems preventing this hardware from overheating – account for nearly 1.5% of global emissions.

But this figure is expected to grow by 15-30% each year to reach 8% of total global greenhouse gas emissions by 2040, write the report’s authors. This would far exceed current emissions from air travel.

Regional concentrations are becoming extreme. For example, up to 20% of all power in Ireland now goes to data centres in Dublin’s cluster.

“We know the environmental impact of AI will be formidable, but tech giants are deliberately vague about the energy requirements implicit in their aims,” said Bhargav Srinivasa Desikan, the report’s lead author from Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre.

“The lack of hard data on electricity and water consumption as well as associated carbon emissions of digital technology leaves policymakers and researchers in the dark about the climate harms AI might cause.”

Some data is available from the tech firms themselves, and it’s not a pretty picture. Google’s reported greenhouse gas emissions rose by 48% between 2019 and 2023, while Microsoft’s reported emissions increased by nearly 30% from 2020 to 2023.

Amazon’s carbon footprint grew around 40% between 2019 and 2021, and – while it has begun to fall – remains well above 2019 levels.

Of course, the numbers could be, and have been, contested, suggesting that actual emissions from tech companies are much higher.

In September 2024, The Guardian reported that the real emissions from the company-owned data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple from 2020 to 2022 have likely been about 662% (7.62 times) higher than officially reported.