No matter whether you upload photos to Dropbox, call a friend via Skype or watch a movie on Netflix: with every action on the Internet, the data centers of the companies consume electricity and thus generate a few grams of carbon dioxide emissions.
According to an analysis by market researcher Synergy, the large cloud providers, known as hyperscalers, will operate a thousand data centers worldwide in 2024 – twice as many as in 2020.
The customers, consumers as well as companies, do not know how high the emissions are, researchers can only estimate them roughly. However, the cloud service providers are vowing improvement – and want to provide customers with a climate balance in addition to the bill in the future.
