The head of the United Nations has called on the world’s largest technology companies to be open about the full environmental toll of the vast computer systems that power their services, warning that the damage being done goes considerably further than most public discussion has acknowledged.
António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, made the call amid growing concern that major firms have been presenting a partial and flattering picture of their environmental performance, disclosing information about their carbon output while staying largely silent on the demands their operations place on freshwater supplies, land and the communities that sit near their enormous computing facilities.
The call comes as a detailed study published earlier this month by the UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health put hard numbers on what that fuller picture looks like. The findings are striking. By the end of the decade, the global network of large computer facilities that power digital services is projected to consume 945 terawatt-hours of electricity each year. To put that figure in perspective, it is nearly three times the combined annual electricity use of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria, countries that are home to more than 650 million people.
But electricity is only part of the story. Those same facilities are on course to use 9.3 trillion litres of water for cooling systems and energy production by 2030 enough to meet the basic annual drinking and household water needs of every person living in sub-Saharan Africa, roughly 1.3 billion people. The land required to generate that power and support the supply chains involved would cover more than 14,500 square kilometres, an area roughly twice the size of the Jakarta metropolitan area, home to over 32 million people.
What makes these projections particularly troubling, the researchers argue, is that they are almost certainly an underestimate. Kaveh Madani, the director of the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, told reporters that what the study had managed to quantify was “probably just the tip of the iceberg.” The technology develops faster than the tools used to measure it, and companies are under no binding obligation in most countries to disclose what their systems actually consume.
The secrecy around that consumption has become a point of increasing friction. In parts of the United States, technology firms have pushed local governments to sign non-disclosure agreements preventing officials from revealing how much water or electricity individual facilities use. A separate analysis of corporate environmental reports from Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple found that actual emissions from their facilities between 2020 and 2022 were likely around seven and a half times higher than what those companies had officially reported. The discrepancy points to a system in which companies choose what to disclose, and tend to choose the numbers that reflect well on them.
As Reuters reported, the UN’s call for transparency arrives at a moment when regulators in some parts of the world are beginning to move in the same direction. The European Commission has been working on legislation that would require technology companies to disclose the energy and water consumption of their large computing facilities, though the process has been repeatedly delayed.
One of the more counterintuitive findings in the UN University study concerns where most of the environmental burden actually comes from. Public attention has generally focused on the process of building and training large computer programmes — a stage that requires enormous computing effort over a concentrated period. But the researchers found that the daily, routine operation of those programmes once they are up and running accounts for between 80 and 90 per cent of their total energy demand over time. Every search, every document drafted, every image produced by these services adds to a cumulative total that, multiplied across billions of interactions every day, amounts to an enormous and largely hidden draw on global resources.
The scale of the difference between task types is also notable. Producing a single computer-generated image has been calculated to require more than a thousand times the energy of a simple text request. Video generation demands more still. When one of the world’s most widely used services is estimated to handle around 2.5 billion requests each day, the energy implications of what users ask for become significant.
The study also raises questions about the assumption that making these systems more efficient will automatically reduce their overall impact. Researchers point to a well-documented economic pattern in which lower costs and improved performance tend to drive higher use, meaning that the total resource consumption rises even as the amount used per individual task falls. It is the same dynamic that was observed with coal in the nineteenth century, and with fuel-efficient cars in the twentieth.
The environmental burden, moreover, is not spread evenly across the world. More than ninety per cent of the specialised computing capacity that supports these services is concentrated in just two countries — the United States and China. Only 32 nations host significant computing infrastructure of their own. The rest of the world consumes the services without hosting the infrastructure, yet often bears the environmental cost through mining of the raw materials needed to build the equipment and through the disposal of electronic waste once it wears out. The UN University study estimates that these large computing networks could generate up to 2.5 million tonnes of electronic waste annually by 2030, much of which is likely to end up in lower-income countries with limited capacity for safe processing.
There are also concerns about how switching to renewable energy, widely presented as a solution to the carbon problem, can create new pressures. Some forms of renewable generation are significantly more water-intensive than the fossil fuel sources they replace, meaning that reducing carbon output in one column of the ledger can worsen the figures in another.
The researchers stop short of arguing that the technology should be curtailed. The UN study is explicit that its findings are not intended as a case against these systems, which have brought genuine benefits across medicine, education and public services. What it demands instead is honesty a requirement that companies report their carbon, water and land footprints together, in standardised units, across all stages of operation, so that governments, investors and the public can make informed judgements.
Whether that honesty will be volunteered remains to be seen. The history of corporate environmental disclosure suggests it rarely is.
