Data Centres Increase Carbon Emissions, But There’s A Sci-Fi Worthy Solution. Kind Of.

Since we’re all hooked on tech now, and artifical intelligence (AI) is blowing up, more and more people are putting money into data centers in places like Malaysia lately.

Data centres are designed to store, manage, and process large amounts of data, to ensure services like data hosting, cloud storage, website hosting, and enterprise application support are possible.

However, maintaining data centres involves high energy and water consumption. Why? Data centres generate a lot of heat and need substantial liquid cooling facilities to keep things running at a high performance.

Data centres currently use treated water — the same resource essential for drinking and cooking — to cool the intense heat generated by servers and electronic devices. Image: Malay Mail

According to the International Energy Agency, data centres accounted for about 1 to 1.5% of global energy use in 2023 and the figure is expected to rise significantly in the future.

In local context, there are 14 planned data centres in Malaysia, three of which were completed in the last year. The remaining are currently under construction or proposed.

RimbaWatch’s report estimates the 14 new data centres would generate 9.9 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually due to Malaysia’s fossil fuel-powered grid.

The emissions total is equivalent to adding 2 million cars on the road or the annual emissions of entire countries such as Papua New Guinea.

Disney gif. Donald Duck weakly crawls across blazing deserts sands with his bill hanging open.

Why should we care? Global excessive carbon dioxide emissions contribute to rising greenhouse gas concentrations which would cause the planet to warm at an accelerated rate. We are seeing some of the climate change effects right now such as rising sea levels, extreme weather events, and disruptions to ecosystems.

To ensure we can still live in a habitable planet, countries worldwide are advised to cut back on carbon emissions and more.

In Malaysia, RimbaWatch shared some recommendations to mitigate climate change and its severe consequences.

The recommendations include:

• Urging the Ministry of Investment, Trade, and Industry (MITI) to develop a 1.5 degree-aligned sectoral-level carbon budget and decarbonisation pathway for data centres.
• Limit approvals to data centres that are committed to using renewable energy for 100% of their operations.
• Urging the Federal Government to commit to phase out all coal and gas-fired power plants.

There’s a sci-fi worthy idea to solve these environmental issues

At the end of the day, we can only do so much to stave off the effects of climate change long term. Data centres are important but it needs significant physical resources and infrastructure to keep it running.

The cost of it all makes it hard for data centres to expand as well which is why some companies are seriously considering moving everything to space. Uh huh, they’re not kidding.

By moving data centres off Earth, the data centres would have access to continuous solar energy and be naturally cooled by the vacuum of space. With no terrestrial issues in space, data centres can be rapidly deployed and expanded as the demand for more data keeps increasing.

Floating Music Video GIF by Epitaph Records

So, why aren’t we packing up data centres and sending them to space? While sending everything to space seems like a good idea, it comes with a host of other challenges too.

First, maintaining space data centres poses a major challenge. The maintenance team will have to contend with space weather such as solar flares which could disrupt operations and deal with space debris.

While advances in robotics and automation can help, remote maintenance can only address some issues. A human crew still needs to be sent to carry out repairs and more. The whole process from sending data centres to orbit to sending a maintenance team remain a costly affair.

Nevertheless, the thought of setting up data centres in space may soon be a reality. Lumen, a company based in Washington, raised US$11 million in seed funding to build a full-scale prototype in 2025.