The Data Center Dilemma: Balancing Use with Sustainability
As of early 2025, the United States had around 5,426 active data centers, Canada about 336 of the facilities, Mexico 173 from 32 markets, with the industry undergoing a rapid transformation.
Asia has a significant market for data centers, the Asia/Pacific region a leader in global investments in data centers, with China having 449 data centers, Japan 222, Hong Kong 122, Singapore 99, and Indonesia 84.
Around 230 data centers are located across Africa, 56 of them in South Africa, 20 of them in Kenya, 19 in Nigeria, and Morocco 12, with the demand for cloud computing services growing ay 25% to 30% per year.
Around eleven thousand eight hundred data centers have been established by March 2024, with the global data center market expected to reach US$527.56 billion this year, network infrastructure dominating the market at a projected market volume of US$254.80 billion, revenue slated to show an annual growth of 6.98 percent in the next five years, hitting a market volume of US$739.05 billion by 2030.
The demand for data centers is showing an explosive growth due to increasing data creation and the rise of artificial intelligence, with the global data consumption expected to exceed 200 zettabytes by 2025, 79 percent of small businesses storing less than 50 TB, and with 402.74 million terabytes generated around the world every single day.
At the same time, the use of artificial intelligence is showing explosive growth, as approximately 11 percent of the global population use Al tools on a regular basis, 82 percent of companies worldwide reporting the adoption of the technology, and 99 percent of hospitals using it for diagnosis and monitoring.
The requirements of the Internet of Things (IoT) are enormous, due to billions of connected devices wanting a massive volume of data that must be processed locally to reduce latency, while the deployment of 5G networks further increases the need for greater computing infrastructure to handle high-speed data transmission.
The use of cloud computing has seen widespread adoption on the global level, with around 84 percent of companies on the planet using private cloud, 96 percent of businesses using public cloud, many of them expecting their cloud computing spend to reach over 80 percent of the money for IT.
With the demand for data center storage increasing, and the rise of artificial intelligence and cloud computing exploding, the increase in installation of data centers becomes inevitable, along with the inevitable consequences.
Unfortunately, data center and data transmission networks accounted for about 1.5 percent of global electricity use in 2024, entailing around 415 TWh hours, while producing in the process one percent of energy-related global carbon footprints, with the boom in data centers expected to produce 2.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions globally through the end of the present decade.
Data centers and data transmissions entail the consumption of enormous quantities of water, large data centers able to consume up to five million gallons per day, a quantity equal to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people, a factor that could threaten freshwater supplies in the near future, as only three percent of earth’s water is freshwater.
Data centers and data transmissions fuel the rise in global temperatures, through the massive energy consumption and reliance on fossil fuel for electricity, with projections showing that the situation could worsen when data center consumption doubles to approximately 945 terawatt-hours by 2030.
In other words, data centers and data transmissions fuel climate change through enormous consumption of electricity, an insatiable demand for water use, and massive emissions of carbon dioxide, with situations set to worsen in the next few years if nothing is done to control the situation.
To prevent data centers from fuelling climate change, they could be built with renewable energy sources, efficient cooling systems, and sustainable designs, keeping in mind the need for water conservation.
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Vegan food from Kenya, Credit, Vegan Kenya