California is a major hub for data centers — the facilities that store and transmit much of the internet. But just how much these power-hungry operations affect the state’s energy use, climate and public health remains an open question for researchers.
A new report released this week by the environmental think tank Next 10 and a UC Riverside researcher attempts to quantify that impact — but its authors say the report is only an estimate without harder data from the centers themselves.
“We are just making these reports pretty much in the dark — since there’s almost zero information,” said Shaolei Ren, an AI researcher at UC Riverside and co-author of the report. “We have extremely little information about data centers in California.”
Ren and his coauthors conclude that between 2019 and 2023, electricity use and carbon emissions by California data centers nearly doubled, while on-site water consumption slightly more than doubled. Much of the increases were attributable to the electricity required to run artificial intelligence computations. But many of the report’s estimates, including its health impacts, are based on limited data — a key issue researchers said they encountered repeatedly when crafting the report.