It's been a rough few weeks for sustainability and Net Zero goals. There was little to nothing accomplished at COP29 in Baku in November, a year after an entreaty to triple the world's nuclear energy ensued at COP28 in Dubai. The summit took place just a week after the US presidential election, which re-elected a candidate who will not have sustainability on his agenda. Then, as the reality set in of January 20 as the first day of the incoming Trump administration, large banks in the US and then very large investor BlackRock withdrew from volunteer organizations focused on Net Zero.

But not all of sustainability's troubles are driven by failed debate and politics. IDCA has found concerns about energy supply in all regions and income tiers of the world. Even though data centers still consume only about 1.1 percent of the world's total grid, that percentage now exceeds 3 percent in the US as a whole.

European data centers reported early in the year they will be pursuing Net Zero goals less aggressively, over concerns about volatile energy supplies. Trouble providing enough energy for data centers has been a norm in Data Center Alley in northern Virginia, US for some time, as the regions 3.75GW footprint consumes a very high proportion of the local grid. Concerns about electricity also drive Singapore's no-growth data center dicta, and have sparked real debate in the Netherlands and Ireland.

In the developed world, Microsoft and Amazon (and others, no doubt) are working on plans to connect directly to existing nuclear plants, while influential business leaders (eg Bill Gates) are touting nuclear as the only way to go for future needs. In the developing world, characterized by grids that produce 1 to 5 percent of the per-person developed-world norm, discussions about new data centers invariably involve the creation of new power built specifically for the new data center.

Over the past year, the potential of AI and its envisioned hyper-sized AI centers has dominated tech talk. Handwaving about creating specific power for specific plants ensues here, too. But everyone knows that a massive demand for AI chips cannot be satisfied in the short term, that new data centers take some time to get approved and built, and that the existence of numerous new nuclear plants will take an X number of years to happen, or maybe 2X, with X being almost any number one chooses to use.

An optimistic person will view this picture and think that times have never been better, never been more full of fruit to pick from the tree. Indeed, in recent weeks a Dubai investor has promised $20B for new data centers in the US alone, Microsoft has promised $80B, and Masayoshi Son has promised $100B (“or maybe twice that”). Early last year, an estimate from a data center real-estate company promised 44GW of new data center footprint by 2028 – more than $500B in construction costs alone.

Humans have accomplished some very heavy lifts over the millennia, including lifting one-quarter of the world's population out of poverty (about 2 billion people) since 1990, according to the United Nations. So the ambitious plans of data center developers (and the power they'll need) should not be dismissed. The question is whether sustainable power and materials are part and parcel of this vision, whether progress toward emissions reduction continues, or whether the world has entered a new, less sustainable era.