Developing Standards for Measuring and Reporting the Environmental Impacts of Data Centers.

This workshop will be taking place in November, 2027 at American University’s School of International Service

Data centers are the physical substrate of the Internet. They store, process, and transmit the data that underpins everyday digital life and increasingly power the rapid expansion of AI. The global data center industry is now estimated at $242 billion and projected to double within the next five years, driven by hyperscaling companies such as Amazon and Meta for AI-related compute demand. Many governments view data center expansion as strategic economic infrastructure for growth and innovation. But this expansion also comes with significant costs for local communities around the country and world—costs which are often felt unevenly. Data centers currently account for an estimated 1–1.5% of global electricity use. Individual large-scale data centers can consume up to five million gallons of water per day, equivalent to the daily use of a town of 50,000 people. They also produce emissions and pollution that are felt the most by the rural communities on the frontlines of this expansion, exacerbating longstanding racial and class-based environmental injustices. Land conversion is a particularly under-measured dimension: data center campuses are often sited on agricultural or undeveloped land, but there is no systematic record of how much land is being transformed, where, or what it displaces.  

One of the many ironies of AI is that despite requiring so much data, very little data exists about the industry itself and the resources it consumes. While some standards have been developed under the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 39, these metrics were designed for operator efficiency and not community accountability. As a result, reporting is often fragmented, voluntary, and frequently aggregated at scales that obscure local harms. In many Global South countries, these issues are far more acute: data center expansion is accelerating, but disclosure mandates, permitting frameworks, and civil society monitoring capacity often lag behind those in the EU and U.S—where it is already inadequate. Where disclosures do exist, they tend to rely on narrow system boundaries, exclude upstream and downstream costs, and report at corporate or regional levels that mask the experience of the communities living next to specific facilities. The result is that decision-makers, including regulators evaluating permit applications, communities negotiating with developers, journalists and scholars striving to aggregate data, and even companies seeking to make credible commitments, lack the comparable, site-level evidence they need. 

This workshop aims to identify the gaps, methodologies, and disclosure practices needed to make the local environmental impacts of Internet infrastructure visible, comparable, and actionable for governments, communities, civil society, and industry.

More details on dates, participants and a full agenda will be shared soon.