Data Centers Are Wasting Energy on Our Old Memes

Memes, reply-all emails, and the thousands of photos on our phones typically have our attention momentarily, and are then quickly forgotten. But energy-wise, they very much go on. That's what Ian Hodgkinson, a professor of strategy at Loughborough University, argues to the Guardian. His recent studies on junk data zooms in on the micro amounts of data we rack up, and what effect it might have on climate change. He says that while people widely consider things like email and digital photos to be carbon neutral, "every piece of data, whether it be an image, whether it be an Instagram post, whatever it is, there's a carbon footprint attached to it."

Hodgkinson found that companies store massive amounts of junk data—68% of it is never used again—and that number is likely similar for personal data usage. Storing all of this data adds up in data centers, which unlike the moniker "the cloud" (where much of our digital footprint is stored) implies, are "incredibly hot, incredibly noisy" and "consume a large amount of energy," he says. For businesses, Hodgkinson and colleague Tom Jackson write for the World Economic Forum that data centers are rivaling the airline industry. "Currently, companies produce 1.3 billion gigabytes of dark data a day," they note, adding, "That's 3,023,255 flights from London to New York."

While tech companies that charge for cloud storage are financially incentivized to keep our stockpiles of junk data, the costs are also environmental. By 2030, the amount of energy used by data centers is set to double in the US according to Data Center Dynamics—largely fueled by the use of artificial intelligence. Hodgkinson believes that changing our view of data from something weightless and invisible to how much carbon it takes to maintain (one email's equivalent is 4 grams, or .14 ounces) can help change our habits. "The one picture isn't going to make a drastic impact," he says. "But of course, if you maybe go into your own phone and you look at all the legacy pictures that you have, cumulatively, that creates quite a big impression in terms of energy consumption." (Google's emissions goals are now at risk, thanks to AI.)