AI’s Carbon Footprint Crisis: Why Carbon Removal Is Essential for Sustainable Data Centers

Somewhere in Virginia, Texas, or Arizona, a data center is being commissioned this month that will draw more power than a small city. The server racks inside will train and run artificial intelligence models for years to come. And the electrons feeding it will, in all likelihood, come partly from natural gas—because that is what can be built fast enough to meet the demand.

AI is driving a major new wave of data center construction, and with it, a surge in demand for power and infrastructure. The International Energy Agency projects that the electricity consumption of global data centers could more than double to around 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, comparable to Japan’s entire electricity demand today.

That matters because much of the new electricity demand from data centers is still likely to be met by power sources where natural gas plays a central role. The backlog for new combined-cycle gas turbines—the more efficient type of gas plant, which generates electricity from both a gas turbine and the heat it produces—already stretches to five years. As a result, some data centers are turning instead to single-cycle gas turbines, which can be deployed more quickly but are even more carbon-intensive.

In any case, that means fossil-fuel use for this generation of digital infrastructure is already largely locked in. Some of the emissions that follow can be reduced through efficiency and grid decarbonization, but a significant share will persist for years to come.

I believe that closing this gap must be the job of carbon removal.

Carbon removal is the process of physically taking carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere. At Climeworks, we have spent the past 17 years developing and deploying direct air capture technology that removes CO₂ from the air and stores it in the ground for thousands of years. More recently, we launched our Climeworks Solutions business that works with third-party providers of other technology and nature-based carbon removal methods, such as reforestation, to help customers access a broader range of approaches and price points.

According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, carbon removal will be necessary if the world is to come close to meeting its climate goals, even alongside deep emissions cuts. For companies building and using digital infrastructure, the question this raises is simple: What do they do about the emissions they cannot yet eliminate?

The strongest near-term answer is to treat carbon removal as part of the cost of digital infrastructure—not as a substitute for clean energy, but as a complement to it. Trying to pair every data center directly with a direct air capture plant may sound attractive, especially because data centers have power, land and waste heat. But in practice, that kind of integration is still highly site-specific and not yet an easy model to repeat at scale.

A more realistic solution is to treat carbon removal as part of the cost of cloud and AI products, where it can be built into the pricing and offset strategies of major tech providers.