Do data centers only seem bad for the climate because we can see them?

Andy Masley

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AI & the Environment<br>Do data centers only seem bad for the climate because we can see them?<br>Most of your climate impacts are invisible

Andy Masley<br>Sep 06, 2025

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One of the most important facts about climate change is that where emissions happen is counter-intuitive, often hidden from us. Using a computer for hours doesn’t add nearly as much to your daily carbon footprint as eating a burger, but the computer feels more energy intensive than your lunch.<br>The climate does not react to which industry emits or which specific buildings emit. It only reacts to the total CO2 in the air.<br>The national microwave

If data centers didn’t exist, we would need to rely on our personal computers to run everything we do online. When you logged into YouTube, you’d run YouTube software on your own computer like it was a video game, and save all videos you upload on your own computer. Every time someone else wanted to watch your videos, they would need to connect to your computer like other players on a video game can connect to a game you’re running. The magic of data centers is that by piling huge amounts of computing in one place, you can make all that computing more energy efficient than it would be otherwise, and more accessible for everyone involved.<br>Other things don’t work this way. If I want to microwave something, I have to own my own microwave. I can’t send things off to some centralized microwave somewhere else.<br>What if I could?<br>Let’s say there were a single national microwave. When you needed food heated up, you would teleport the food to the national microwave, in the same way you effectively teleport information from your computer to data centers.<br>This microwave would need to be massive to fit all microwaved meals Americans are making at any given time.

I estimate that all microwaves in America use ~25 GWh of electricity every day. This means that the big national microwave would be using as much electricity every day as Seattle. An entire new city’s worth of electricity demand added to the grid, just for heating food!

What about the water? Well the average water consumption per kWh in American power plants is 4.35 L, so this microwave would be consuming 110,000,000 liters of water every single day. 45 Olympic pools of water every day.<br>I think if the big national microwave existed, it would be drawing a lot of scorn. “This seems so wasteful. What’s wrong with just using an oven?” People would see it as sapping a whole city’s worth of energy. There would be articles about how it’s sapping the local grid and using as much energy as 800,000 households.<br>But this microwave does exist. It’s just hidden, broken up into hundreds of millions of little pieces of itself scattered across America. The impacts are just as real as if it existed in one place. The climate does not care about where emissions happen. It just responds to total emissions. All microwaves in America are emitting just as much as the big national microwave would. But they don’t exist in one place as a single evil building people can get mad at. The big national microwave is invisible.<br>Suppose someone says “Tech bros just reinvented the oven, only this time it’s destroying the planet.” Would we want people to stop using the big microwave and switch to their ovens?<br>Well, ovens use way more energy to cook the same food. Getting people to stop using the big microwave and switch to ovens would actually cause way more emissions in total, probably around 10 times as much. Those emissions would just be dispersed across the country, so people would feel better about them, because they couldn’t see them. People really like when they can’t actually see the effects they’re having on the climate, but those effects are still real. Shutting down the big national microwave would be a huge environmental mistake, even though it looks much more evil than everyone’s individual ovens.<br>These are three mistakes I think people would make if we had the big national microwave:<br>They would only see it as a single, inert building using a ton of energy, and wouldn’t compare its benefits per unit emissions to other buildings. They wouldn’t consider how many more people were interacting with it, or divide the energy cost by the number of people using it. It would make sense that a building managing all microwave needs for all America would be using more energy than a nearby toy store, because it would be serving a lot more people. The toy store is actually way more inefficient with its energy, but comparing it to the toy store would be ridiculous. If it sounds ridiculous to say “All American microwaves are using more energy than this one toy store, people should all throw away their microwaves!” then it should sound equally ridiculous to condemn the big national microwave for the same reason.

They would want to shut it down and have switch to things that seem more...