Datacentres drive up big tech's carbon emissions to a third of those of France

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/11/microsoft-amazon-google-datacentre-carbon-emissions-france

84 90 11 days ago

bamboozled3• 11 days ago

Man, we are cooked, literally

simgt• 11 days ago

No, wait! The increased productivity will lead to a decoupling of the economy from resources consumption and GHGs emission. Just one more data center.

bamboozled3• 11 days ago

It’s such a tiring narrative isn’t it ?

timschmidt4• 11 days ago

The solution is simple: require datacenters to overprovision solar panels and grid-scale batteries for themselves, and use that capacity to strengthen the grid and transition off of hydrocarbons.

ch4s34• 11 days ago

You can’t get a grid tie for those panels in most of the US right now. The process for connecting to the grid is done serially, and requires a large study for any new generation.

bamboozled3• 10 days ago

The EPA has been dismantled basically, so there is no "solution" like that going to happen. Source [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKg_BLqOet8

garganzol• 11 days ago

For a context: France relies heavily on automotive transport, plus it's a home to enormous agricultural sector, tractors are literally everywhere in the country during the summer. To a certain degree, structurally it resembles USA a lot.

timschmidt4• 11 days ago

However they also quite famously rely on a majority of nuclear power for their electric grid. Great for France, but that makes them an already-low carbon emitter compared to many others and an ungenerous comparison.

defrost• 11 days ago

In related current news:

Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/07/11/irish-datacen...

  The latest figures from Ireland's Central Statistics Office (CSO) show that giant server farms now account for nearly a quarter of the country's metered electricity consumption.

  Their share rose to 23 percent in 2025 after passing 20 percent in 2023 and 14 percent in 2021 – up from just 5 percent way back in 2015.

Luckily this will all be offset by the pot of gold at the end of the AI rainbow.

Muromec7• 11 days ago

23 percent is a bit fucked actually

Laurel12342• 10 days ago

It's really fucked in the country with the most expensive kWh in all of Europe...

amarcheschi3• 11 days ago

One more datacenter bro one more datacenter bro please I swear bro one more datacenter and everything will be OK please bro

simianwords2• 10 days ago

The optimal number of data centers is just enough so that my personal use is covered. No more. No less. Screw other people’s needs and demands because I know better.

Pluralism? What’s that?

insane_dreamer2• 10 days ago

shocking how quickly we went from "how can we contain global warming to 1.5C increase?" to "we've (hopefully) unlocked a massive new corporate revenue source, screw everything else"

andrekandre2• 8 days ago

its not shocking to me; in the end, those with capital get their way... whatever we all democracy nowadays has been lobbied and electioneered-by-money to hell and back with no end in sight

Someone• 8 days ago

“Microsoft’s oldest hyperscale data center in the Netherlands, a series of interconnected warehouses along the A7 in Middenmeer, currently consumes over 1 percent of all Dutch electricity

[…]

At the end of 2024, data centers already accounted for 4.6 percent of the Netherlands’ total electricity consumption, Statistics Netherlands (CBS) calculated late last year. Grid operators expect this to grow to around 15 percent of all electricity used by 2030”

Muromec7• 11 days ago

But... Datacenters don't burn anything, right? Powerplants do and we try to switch all the transport and heating and whatever to be electric.

So the answer is to build the damb nuclear power and a lot of it and price CO2 emissions at the actual cost of sucking the thing back out if the atmosphere

black_puppydog• 11 days ago

price CO2 emissions at the actual cost of sucking the thing back out if the atmosphere

This is the only relevant bit actually. The rest will follow from there. And in principle, at least in Europe, we already have some mechanisms to do this. We'd "just" have to up the prices.

BUT of course with the right wing on the advance, and with them having identified basic physics (i.e. climate change) as a culture war terrain, this keeps being watered down... Oh well... This is why we can't have nice things... like a future...

59percentmore• 10 days ago

*raise the prices

Aerroon2• 10 days ago

We've been paying hefty excise taxes on gasoline in Europe for decades. Yet nothing has changed. Environmentalists still have the exact same demands and supposedly nothing positive has come from this. It has just made everything more expensive. So what's the point?

scottcha• 10 days ago

They do have a growing amount of Scope 1 emissions (emissions from their on site sources) which originally was primarily on site diesel but due to grid interconnect delays have been growing number of on site gas turbines.

This certainly wouldn’t be necessary with adequate generation and transmission capacity.

trollbridge8• 10 days ago

Which is why things like nuclear power plants, grid upgrades, hydroelectric projects, and intelligently placed wind/solar (instead of placing it due to subdisies or political concerns) should have been done a long time ago.

barnabee• 10 days ago

This is true, but I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that these data centres shouldn't be built, or at least allowed to operate until/unless they can be powered cleanly and without cornering the market and driving out existing consumers of power.

If they're so keen to build that they're willing to fund power generation (e.g. on site gas generators) then it should be clean/renewable (solar, wind, small modular reactors, full scale nuclear plants, whatever).

Degrowth is bad but so is ignoring the planet, the environment, and people's health to get ahead faster in business.

Muromec7• 10 days ago

I don't understand why permits are given for new generation that is CO2 positive outside of exceptional cases or when it replaces even worse kind. It's insanity.

padjo• 10 days ago

Building the nuclear power plants should solve the problem in about 50 years...

cold_pizz4• 11 days ago

We don't really need the French on the other hand, how could we live without AI?

JodieBenitez• 10 days ago

Yann Le Cun enters the chat...

oytis• 10 days ago

Yeah, we are not talking about ecological impact of France enough

ChrisArchitect• 10 days ago

Microsoft latest report shows 25% emissions raised due to AI data centers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48870229

spicyusername• 10 days ago

Pretty small if you consider the value they provide, honestly.

And they'll ride the transition to green energy for "free".

pebble• 10 days ago

Is this value in the room with us?

baggy_trough• 10 days ago

Do you know what site you're on?

runarberg2• 10 days ago

AI produces way more harm then value.

amazingamazing• 10 days ago

legality of the datacenters aside, I wonder why countries don't at least demand that they're totally carbon neutral or free. it's possible today. it's not like it's sci-fi.

jezzamon• 10 days ago

I think most ways of obtaining carbon neutrality are a little bit BS, that's why.

An alternative is what Google is theoretically aiming for: being carbon-free. But they've already started using language describing it as a moonshot or idealistic goal so seems likely they'll abandon that

https://sustainability.google/reports/247-carbon-free-energy...

Laurel12342• 10 days ago

Carbon offsets are absolutely a scam but you could easily force data centers to provide their own renewable energy.

fulafel• 10 days ago

USA is partly a petrostate so regulatory capture is a problem. Negative externalities are not paid for by the polluters. To mitigate the climate catastrophe it would be important to ramp down fossil fuel production in a big hurry.

In Europe this is covered by the emission trading system (EU ETS) and datacenters have to share the same shrinking emissions quota as other industries.

altern8• 10 days ago

Not to worry.

There are laws in the EU that will save the planet, like drinking from soggy paper straws instead of normal ones and requiring caps stay attached in plastic bottles.

And just to make sure, at least in Poland they now charge you $0.10 if you buy anything plastic until you bring it back to the grocery store empty.

We are safe.

mike_hock• 10 days ago

It literally has only downsides except some convenience for people who don't want to think and don't want to work.

Datacentres drive up big tech's carbon emissions to a third of those of France

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