{"ID":3084675,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-05T06:46:15.197025399Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-06T20:38:24.62690768Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05420","arxiv_id":"2606.05420","title":"Assessing the Carbon Emissions and Energy Consumption of U.S. Hyperscale Data Centers","abstract":"The rapid proliferation of hyperscale data centers (HDCs) in the US, mainly driven by the adoption of artificial intelligence, has raised concerns about this industry's environmental footprint. We compiled facility-level information on 403 US hyperscale data centers operating between May 2024 and April 2025 and estimated their electricity consumption, electricity sources, and attributable CO2 emissions. Across different facility-load scenarios, these HDCs consumed approximately 68-99 TWh of electricity and were associated with about 37-54 million metric tons of CO2. Under the central scenario, HDC electricity demand corresponded to approximately 1.8% of total US electricity consumption, with roughly 54% of attributed generation supplied by fossil-fuel sources. The HDC electricity-weighted average carbon intensity was approximately 545 gCO2/kWh, about 48% above the contemporaneous US national grid-average carbon intensity of 370 gCO2/kWh. Our approach provides an attributional tool for assessing the environmental footprint of hyperscale data centers using the most recent EPA eGRID plant-level data.","short_abstract":"The rapid proliferation of hyperscale data centers (HDCs) in the US, mainly driven by the adoption of artificial intelligence, has raised concerns about this industry's environmental footprint. We compiled facility-level information on 403 US hyperscale data centers operating between May 2024 and April 2025 and estimat...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05420","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.05420v1","authors":"[\"Gianluca Guidi\",\"Francesca Dominici\",\"Tiziano Squartini\",\"Callaway Sprinkle\",\"Jonathan Gilmour\",\"Kevin Butler\",\"Eric Bell\",\"Scott Delaney\",\"Falco J. Bargagli-Stoffi\"]","published":"2026-06-03T20:38:10Z","proceeding":"cs.AI","tasks":"[\"cs.AI\",\"stat.AP\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}