Assessing the Carbon Emissions and Energy Consumption of U.S. Hyperscale Data Centers

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 3 Jun 2026] Assessing the Carbon Emissions and Energy Consumption of U.S. Hyperscale Data Centers Gianluca Guidi, Francesca Dominici, Tiziano Squartini, Callaway Sprinkle, Jonathan Gilmour, Kevin Butler, Eric Bell, Scott Delaney, Falco J. Bargagli-Stoffi 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. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Applications (stat.AP) Cite as: arXiv:2606.05420 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2606.05420v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.05420 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Gianluca Guidi [view email] [v1] Wed, 3 Jun 2026 20:38:10 UTC (7,077 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs stat stat.AP References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)