A new study has highlighted the slow progress of China's major cloud computing and data centre companies in adopting renewable energy.
Greenpeace report reveals that VNEP Group, the Microsoft 365 operator in China, uses only 4.35% renewable energy.
The news comes days after it was revealed that China wants to increase its computing power by 30% by 2025 to meet the demands of artificial intelligence and energy-hungry data centers.
China's dirty data centers
The Clean Cloud 2024 report evaluated 10 cloud providers and 15 data center operators in China, who collectively held more than half (52%) of the IaaS market in the first half of 2023.
Alarmingly, only eight companies – Tencent, ByteDance, Kuaishou Technology, GDS, VNET Group, Chindata Group, Shanghai AtHub and Bohao Internet Data Services – have committed to fully transitioning to renewable energy by 2030, a landmark year cited by major companies around the world as a key date for keeping emissions under control and reducing the impacts of global warming.
Some companies are already making promising progress – Alibaba Cloud has purchased 1.6 billion kWh of renewable energy in 2023 and Tencent has committed to buying 1.3 billion kWh in 2024 – but these are not reflective of the entire industry.
The study found that Baidu's renewable energy usage is 5.11% and VNET Group's is 4.35%, which is alarming considering the rapid expansion of the country's computing capacity.
Ranking cloud providers out of 100 for transparency, carbon reduction measures and targets, renewable energy procurement and targets, and government and industry influence, the organization only gave two companies scores close to 90: Alibaba Group and Tencent.
Baidu, ByteDance and Huawei were the only ones to score over 50, with UCloud in last place with a score of 15.
In the report, Greenpeace calls for greater transparency in reporting on renewable energy use to ensure greater accountability, as well as greater efforts to meet national policy requirements. Greenpeace also urges companies to aim to use 100% renewable energy in Scopes 1, 2 and 3 by the end of the decade.
