The United Nations has called on the world’s biggest technology and artificial intelligence companies to be transparent about how much electricity and water their data centres use, and how much carbon they emit.
The warning
UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that, on current trends, data centres powering AI could by 2030 consume more electricity than all but a handful of countries, and use enough water to meet the annual needs of hundreds of millions of people. Their emissions could approach those of a large industrialised economy such as the United Kingdom.
Why data centres matter
Data centres are vast buildings full of servers that run around the clock. They power the internet, cloud services and the AI tools — chatbots, image generators and others — that have spread rapidly in recent years. Training and running large AI models requires enormous computing power, and with it large amounts of electricity and water for cooling.
What the UN is asking for
The UN wants major companies, including Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon, as well as AI developers such as OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI, to:
- publish detailed figures on the energy and water used by their data centres;
- disclose their carbon emissions and the land their facilities occupy;
- commit to powering their operations with renewable energy.
The underlying message is that if AI is to help build a better future, the public needs to know what it costs today.
Pushback
The call comes as some companies have scaled back or delayed climate pledges in the race to build AI capacity. To get around limits on grid connections, some new data centres are being powered by gas turbines. In Europe, some industry voices have argued that fossil fuels may be needed in the short term to keep the continent technologically competitive.
Spain and data centres
The debate is relevant in Spain, where a wave of large data centre projects has been announced, particularly in Aragón and around Madrid, attracted by cheap renewable electricity and available land. Local communities have raised questions about water use in a country prone to drought, and the new UN call is likely to add to demands for clearer information about the real footprint of these facilities.
