New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

by James Bridle

Computation is both a victim of and a contributor to climate change. As of 2015, the world’s data centres, where exabytes of digital information are stored and processed, consumed about 3 per cent of the world’s electricity – and accounted for 2 per cent of total global emissions. This is about the same carbon footprint as the airline industry. The 416.2 terawatt hours of electricity consumed by global data centres in 2015 exceeded that of the whole United Kingdom, at 300 terawatt hours.18 This consumption is projected to escalate massively, as a result of both the growth of digital infrastructure and the positive feedback from rising global temperatures. In response to vast increases in data storage and computational capacity in the last decade, the amount of energy used by data centres has doubled every four years, and is expected to triple in the next ten years.