Despite the clean and paperless allure of tech companies, Silicon Valley is fast emerging as a key threat to the race to net zero.

The world’s computing and information storage sector has a larger carbon footprint than the airline industry, while a single data centre can consume as much electricity as 50,000 homes.

That footprint is only going to grow as artificial intelligence (AI) and language models such as ChatGPT become increasingly embedded in the global economy.

Anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate, a PHD candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has dubbed it “Cloud the Carbonivore”.

“Data centres are effectively our factories,” adds Alex Craven, chief executive of tech consultancy The Data City.

The extent of the problem has remained unseen, however, as California’s warehouses of web servers are hidden from the public eye.

“If I was plugging in my laptop and it was powered by diesel and I could see the emissions coming out of the side, I would think differently about it. But everything feels clean just because we don’t see the emissions in front of us,” says Asim Hussain, chairman at the Green Software Foundation.