Home / Environment / Google AI Datacenters Emit 5X More Carbon Than Declared
Google AI Datacenters Emit 5X More Carbon Than Declared
9 May
Summary
- Google misstated datacenter carbon emissions, making them appear five times smaller.
- Three planned datacenters could account for over 1% of the UK's 2033 carbon budget.
- An error compared annual emissions to a five-year carbon budget, misleading councils.
Planning applications for AI datacenters in the UK, including those proposed by Google, contain significant misstatements regarding their carbon emissions. Experts have identified that the environmental impact of these projects was presented as five times smaller than actual figures suggest. This miscalculation involves comparing one year of the datacenters' projected emissions against the UK's full five-year carbon budget, a method that distorts the true climate impact.
Google is seeking permission for two large datacenters in Essex: one in Thurrock and another at North Weald. For the Thurrock site, emissions were stated as 0.033% of the 2028-2032 carbon budget, but the correct figure is 0.165%. The North Weald site's emissions were reported as 0.043% of the 2033-2037 budget, whereas the accurate figure is 0.215%.
Furthermore, a third datacenter planned by Greystoke in north Lincolnshire also features the same flawed calculation. Its emissions were stated as 0.1043% of the 2033 carbon budget, but the actual figure is 0.5215%. At peak output, this site alone could generate one million tonnes of CO2 equivalent annually, nearly matching the total annual emissions from all UK domestic flights combined.
Experts from the tech justice nonprofit Foxglove highlighted these discrepancies, suggesting that councils and the public have been seriously misled. They emphasized that without a clear explanation from the developers, these misrepresentations raise serious questions about transparency regarding the climate impact of such large-scale technological infrastructure.
