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Lotfi Belkhir, an associate professor at McMaster University in Canada who coauthored an earlier paper that predicted a roughly 10-fold increase in the share of global greenhouse gas emissions from data centers by 2040, says he does not expect further energy efficiency to be easy to come by. For one thing, he says, the chip industry is now pushing against the limits of Moore's law. For another, he argues, the Science paper does not consider the rise of cryptocurrencies and blockchains, which are very energy intensive.
“These trends might not be able to maintain the recent plateau in energy use beyond the next doubling of demand,” which will likely occur in the next five years, says Eric Masanet, an associate professor who leads the Energy and Resource Systems Analysis Laboratory at Northwestern University, said in an email.
To encourage energy efficiency to keep pace with demand, the authors of the report recommend that policymakers enforce stringent energy-efficiency standards for servers, storage, and network devices, and adopt policies that promote the use of more-efficient cloud computing—for example, through procurement standards and utility rebates. They also call for requiring data center operators to publish their energy usage, noting that data is harder to come by in countries like China, where data center usage is growing quickly, and where fewer companies reveal their energy use.