ESG Inside the Data Centre

Data centres have become one of the defining infrastructure asset classes of the 2020s, the physical backbone of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and the broader digital economy. Yet their environmental footprint is impossible to ignore. The International Energy Agency estimates that global data centre electricity consumption stood at approximately 415 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2024, accounting for around 1.5% of the world's total annual electricity use, more than the entire electricity demand of France. Under the IEA's central projection, that figure is set to more than double to 945 TWh by 2030, driven primarily by AI-optimised compute workloads. For investors, operators, and ESG practitioners, this creates an urgent and multidimensional sustainability challenge that now sits squarely at the heart of due diligence and capital allocation.