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Cited by 146Green IT and SustainabilityCloud Computing and Resource ManagementEnergy Efficiency in Computing

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 45 of the 45 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; none of the 44 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.

The Cloud Is Material: On the Environmental Impacts of Computation and Data Storage

Open access
Monserrate, Steven Gonzalez·2022·MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing
DOI 10.21428/2c646de5.031d4553
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Abstract

In the age of machine learning, cryptocurrency mining, and seemingly infinite data storage capacity enabled by cloud computing, the environmental costs of ubiquitous computing in modern life are obscured by the sheer complexity of infrastructures and supply chains involved in even the simplest of digital transactions. How does computation contribute to the warming of the planet? As information technology (IT) capacity demands continue to trend upward, what are some of the ecological obstacles that must be overcome to accommodate an ever-expanding, carbon-hungry Cloud? How do these material impacts play out in everyday life, behind the scenes, where servers, fiber optic cables, and technicians facilitate cloud services? This case study draws on firsthand ethnographic research in data centers—sprawling libraries of computer servers that facilitate everything from email to commerce—to identify some of the far-reaching and tangled environmental impacts of computation and data-storage infrastructures. It surveys a range of empirical accounts of server technicians to illustrate on-the-ground examples of material and ecological factors that permeate everyday life in the Cloud. These examples include air conditioning and thermal management, water cycling, and the disposal of e-waste. By attending to the culture of workplace practice and the behaviors and training of technicians in data centers, this case study reveals that the Cloud is not fully automated, nor is it hyperrational; emotion, instinct, and human judgment are enlisted to keep servers running. This case study closes with a speculative vignette that scales up from various local impacts to a planetary framework, sketching some of the particular ways that computation contributes to climate change and the Anthropocene.

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

This case study argues that the Cloud is material and ecological, drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork in North American data centers to trace carbon, water, noise, and e-waste impacts. It also shows that data center work is cultural and reliant on human judgment, not fully automated or hyperrational.

Key findings

  • Data centers are carbon- and energy-intensive: cooling accounts for greater than 40 percent of electricity usage in most data centers; collectively they use 200 TWh annually, account for 0.3 percent of overall carbon emissions (2 percent including networked devices), and in some cases only 6–12 percent of energy consumed is devoted to active computation. The Cloud’s carbon footprint is greater than the airline industry’s, and a single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of fifty thousand homes. Training a handful of AI models can emit over 626,000 pounds of CO₂, and cryptocurrency production is estimated at 20–115 TWh annually, around 0.33 percent of global electricity usage.
  • Water and noise are major local impacts: the NSA’s Utah Data Center uses seven million gallons of water daily; residents in Mesa, Arizona and Bluffdale, Utah face water shortages and power outages; and residents near data centers in Chandler, Arizona and Chicago’s Printer’s Row reported hypertension, elevated cortisol, and anxiety from continuous noise, even when decibel levels fell below local ordinance thresholds.
  • E-waste and device turnover are severe: over 7 billion devices have been manufactured since 2007, with average lifespans under two years; less than 16 percent of annual e-waste is recycled; and a single desktop computer requires 240 kilograms of fossil fuels, 22 kilograms of chemicals, and 1,500 kilograms of water to manufacture.
  • Sustainability is shaped by workplace culture: technicians rely on instinct, fear of downtime, and practices like “flood cooling,” showing that ecological impacts extend beyond design limits to human behavior, training, and norms.

Methods

  • Design: an ethnographic case study based on five years of qualitative research and participant observation in North American data centers, supplemented by a broad literature overview across computer science, engineering, media studies, and related fields.
  • Data/sample: firsthand fieldnotes and interviews with data center technicians and managers; community fieldwork in Mesa/Chandler, Arizona and Chicago’s Printer’s Row; industry meetups; and virtual interviews.
  • Analysis: thematic and ethnographic analysis of material infrastructures and workplace culture, closing with a speculative vignette that scales local impacts to a planetary framework.

Limitations

  • The paper states that carbon and energy figures are “far from comprehensive” because emissions data are often proprietary, forcing scholars and activists to rely on public records and voluntary company data; it also notes that cryptocurrency carbon estimates are debated.
  • The paper states that its closing speculative vignette is unlikely to unfold as described.
  • Evident from the text: the ethnographic scope is limited to North American data centers and selected communities, not a global representative sample, and the study does not provide systematic quantitative measurement of environmental impacts.

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Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.21428/2c646de5.031d4553

Cites

45 of 45 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

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Verification

Claims the paper makes

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Show all 28 claims

  • Probably not a substantial claim. 32
  • It may state two separate claims as one. 26
49 of 49

  • The paper relies on this without support.

    A sustainable Cloud is achievable, so that the ecological problem is a matter of will and imagination rather than an unavoidable consequence of design limits.

    “The case study illustrates that the ecological dynamics we find ourselves in are not entirely a consequence of design limits, but of human practices and choices-among individuals, communities, corporations, and governments-combined with a deficit of will and imagination to bring about a sustainable Cloud.”
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Each contradiction between two passages listed here was confirmed by an independent check.

  • Conflicting climate-neutral pledge dates

    Minor

    The text says the European data-center consortium promises climate neutrality by 2050, but the cited source's title says European cloud providers pledge to reach it by 2030.

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Citations

Cites

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Show all 45 references

Research works printed but not linked: 41

  1. Gabrys, Jennifer. (2013). Digital Rubbish. University of Michigan Press.
  2. Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
  3. Hogan, Mél. "Big Data Ecologies." Ephemera 18, no. 3 (2018): 631-57. http://ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/contribution/18-3hogan.pdf.
  4. Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski, 71-93. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
  5. Walker, Janet, and Nicole Starosielski. Sustainable Media. New York: Routledge, 2016.
  6. Louise Amoore, "Cloud Geographies: Computing, Data, Sovereignty," Progress in Human Geography 42, no. 1 (2018): 4-24, https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132516662147; · DOI · Paper page
  7. Nathan Ensmenger and Rebecca Slayton, "Computing and the Environment," Information & Culture 52, no. 3 (2017): 295-303, https://doi.org/10.1353/lac.2017.0011. ↩ · DOI
  8. Nicole Starosielski, "Thermocultures of Geological Media," Cultural Politics 12, no. 3 (2016): 293-309, https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-3648858; · DOI
  9. Nicole Starosielski, Media Hot and Cold (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021). ↩
  10. Junaid Shuja et al., "Sustainable Cloud Data Centers: A Survey of Enabling Techniques and Technologies," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 62 (2016): 195-214, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2016.04.034; · DOI
  11. Julia Velkova, "Data That Warms: Waste Heat, Infrastructural Convergence, and the Computation Traffic Commodity," Big Data & Society 3, no. 2 (2016), https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716684144; · DOI
  12. Mikko Wahlroos et al., "Future Views on Waste Heat Utilization: Case of Data Centers in Northern Europe," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 82 (2018): 1749-64, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2017.10.058. ↩ · DOI
  13. Tim Donaghy, Caroline Henderson, and Elizabeth Jardim, "Oil in the Cloud," Greenpeace, May 19, 2020, https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/reports/oil-in-the-cloud/, and Canay Özden-Schilling, The Current Economy: Electricity Markets and Technoeconomics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021). ↩
  14. Mél Hogan, "Big Data Ecologies," Ephemera 18, no. 3 (2018): 631-57, http://ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/contribution/18-3hogan.pdf. ↩
  15. Nicola Jones, "How to Stop Data Centres from Gobbling Up the World's Electricity," Nature 561, no. 7722 (2018): 163-66, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586- 018-06610-y. ↩ · DOI · Paper page
  16. Alix Johnson, "Data Centers as Infrastructural In-Betweens: Expanding Connections and Enduring Marginalities in Iceland," American Ethnologist 46, no. 1 (2019): 75-88, https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12735; · DOI
  17. Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau, "'Where the Internet Lives': Data Centers as Cloud Infrastructure," in Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures, ed. Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski (Champaign: University of Illinois Press), 71-93. ↩
  18. Burrington, "The Environmental Toll of a Netflix Binge"; Cook et al., "#ClickClean"; Jones, "How to Stop Data Centres from Gobbling Up the World's Electricity." These figures are far from comprehensive. Given that the data required to calculate the carbon emissions is often proprietary, scholars and activists can only draw upon publicly available records, documents, and data provided voluntarily by companies like Amazon and Google. Compare with the discussion in Jonathan Koomey and Eric Masanet, "Does Not Compute: Avoiding Pitfalls Assessing the Internet's Energy and Carbon Impacts," Joule 5, no. 7 (2021): 1625-28, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2021.05.007. ↩ · DOI · Paper page
  19. Peter Dauvergne, "Is Artificial Intelligence Greening Global Supply Chains? Exposing the Political Economy of Environmental Costs," Review of International Political Economy (2020), https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2020.1814381; · DOI · Paper page
  20. Peter Dauvergne, "The Globalization of Artificial Intelligence: Consequences for the Politics of Environmentalism," Globalizations 18, no. 2 (2021): 285-99, https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2020.1785670. ↩ · DOI · Paper page
  21. Lynn H. Kaack et al., "Aligning Artificial Intelligence with Climate Change Mitigation," preprint, submitted October 6, 2021, hal-03368037, https://hal.archives- ouvertes.fr/hal-03368037. See also Payal Dhar, "The Carbon Impact of Artificial Intelligence," Nature Machine Intelligence 2 (2020): 423-25, https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-020-0219-9. ↩ · DOI · Paper page
  22. Hogan, "Big Data Ecologies." See also Mél Hogan, "Data Flows and Water Woes: The Utah Data Center," Big Data & Society (December 2015), https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951715592429. ↩ · DOI · Paper page
  23. Nathan Ensmenger, "The Environmental History of Computing," Technology and Culture 59, no. 4 (2018): S7-S33, https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2018.0148. ↩ · DOI
  24. Renee Obringer et al., "The Overlooked Environmental Footprint of Increasing Internet Use," Resources, Conservation and Recycling 167 (2021): 105389, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2020.105389. ↩ · DOI
  25. Arline L. Bronzaft and Dennis P. McCarthy, "The Effect of Elevated Train Noise on Reading Ability," Environment and Behavior 7, no. 4 (1975): 517-28, https://doi.org/10.1177/001391657500700406; · DOI
  26. Arline L. Bronzaft, "Impact of Noise on Health: The Divide between Policy and Science," Open Journal of Social Sciences 5, no. 5 (2017): 108-20, https://doi.org/10.4236/jss.2017.55008; · DOI
  27. Abotutu Ahi Abel, "Urban Noise Pollution in Nigerian Cities: Imperatives for Abatement," Current Journal of Applied Science & Technology 10, no. 6 (2015): 1-9, https://doi.org/10.9734/BJAST/2015/18466; · DOI
  28. Malik Muhammad Anees, Muhammad Qasim, and Aroj Bashir, "Physiological and Physical Impact of Noise Pollution on Environment," Earth Science Pakistan 1, no. 1 (2017): 8-11, https://doi.org/10.26480/esp.01.2017.08. · DOI
  29. See also Nathaniel Lee, David Anderson, and Jessica Orwig, "Noise Pollution Is a Bigger Threat to Your Health Than You May Think, and Americans Aren't Taking It Seriously," Business Insider, January 26, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/noise-pollution-effects-human-hearing-health- quality-of-life-2018-1. ↩ · DOI
  30. Jennifer C. Hsieh, "Making Noise in Urban Taiwan: Decibels, the State, and Sonosociality," American Ethnologist 48, no. 1 (2021): 51-64, https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13003. ↩ · DOI
  31. Paul Dourish, The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017);
  32. Jennifer Gabrys, Digital Rubbish (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013);
  33. Ensmenger and Slayton, "Computing and the Environment"; Boy Lüthje and Florian Butollo, "Why the Foxconn model Does Not Die: Production Networks and Labour Relations in the IT Industry in South China," Globalizations 14, no. 2 (2017): 216-31, https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2016.1203132. ↩ · DOI
  34. Ruha Benjamin, "Racial Fictions, Biological Facts: Expanding the Sociological Imagination through Speculative Methods," Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 2, no. 2 (2016): 1-28, on 2, https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v2i2.28798. ↩ · DOI
  35. Casey Fiesler, "Ethical Considerations for Research Involving (Speculative) Public Data," Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3 (December 2019), 249, https://doi.org/10.1145/3370271; · DOI
  36. Casey Fiesler, "Innovating Like an Optimist, Preparing Like a Pessimist: Ethical Speculation and the Legal Imagination," Colorado Technology Law Journal 19, no. 1 (2021): 1-18, https://ctlj.colorado.edu/?p=696. ↩
  37. Paul J. Crutzen, "The 'Anthropocene,'" in Earth System Science in the Anthropocene, ed. Eckart Ehlers and Thomas Krafft (Berlin: Springer, 2006), 13-18. ↩
  38. Jason W. Moore, "The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis," Journal of Peasant Studies 44, no. 3 (2017): 594-630, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1235036; · DOI
  39. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016);
  40. McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (New York: Verso, 2015); and Kathryn Yussoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). ↩
  41. Steven Gonzalez Monserrate, "Silicon Fox," Anthropology and Humanism 45, no. 1 (2020): 130-38, https://doi.org/10.1111/anhu.12276. · DOI

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Metadata

Authors
Monserrate, S. G.
Affiliations
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
Corresponding author
Monserrate, Steven Gonzalez
ORCID
Monserrate, Steven Gonzalez
Venue
MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing
Publisher
PubPub
Published
2022-01-27
Issue
Winter 2022
DOI
10.21428/2c646de5.031d4553
OpenAlex
W4210572958
Semantic Scholar
ac4d11f3e5762aa84373f465ed807324c526161c
Cited by
145
References
45
Citations by year
2026: 47 · 2025: 34 · 2024: 27 · 2023: 35 · 2022: 2
FWCI
6.56
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by-sa
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Electrical and Electronic Engineering › Green IT and Sustainability
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Cloud Computing and Resource Management
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Hardware and Architecture › Energy Efficiency in Computing
Keywords
cloud computing, data centers, CO2 emissions, climate change, thermal management, water consumption, e-waste disposal, organizational culture, Anthropocene, IT infrastructure

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