Sun, Wei, Vinod Narayanan, Eric Masanet, Yingbo Zhang, Ayse K. Coskun, Varun Sivaram, Ana Valdivia, and Dillon Mahmoudi. 2026. “Making Sustainability Central to the Data Centers of the Future.” Cell Reports Sustainability 3 (9): 100866. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crsus.2026.100866.
Abstract
As data center expansion accelerates in response to surging demand for AI, how can we ensure that data centers are built and operated sustainably across environmental, technological, and social dimensions? Drawing on a panel of experts worldwide, this Voices piece examines challenges in developing and operating data centers sustainably.
Data centers and digital equity in the Global North and Global South
Investments in tech and energy capital are prompting the creation of data centers across the Global South, but the North dwarfs their scale and growth. Frontier AI compute, where the largest models are trained, stays concentrated in regions with access to capital, chips, and cloud demand. The South is becoming a compute consumer, not a producer, on terms it does not set. Microsoft’s pledge to invest $50 billion across the South does not change this, despite regulatory tolerance and the freedom to externalize water, grid strain, and carbon. Where facilities appear, such as Singapore’s spillover into Johor or India’s pivot from fossil assets to compute capacity, they serve regional cloud and inference, not frontier training: bets on demand that may never arrive.
The real divide is access. The South trains no frontier models. It lacks the GPU clusters, the capital, and the chip supply that Northern firms monopolize. It pays computational and data rent to consume models built elsewhere, at prices set by the firms that own them. The infrastructure arrives as dependency, not capacity. The gap that concretizes is not environmental burden migrating south, though those burdens are real where facilities land. It is exclusion from the digital means of production dressed as market integration. Consigned to the demand side of a rent relation, the South consumes AI it cannot make, while the extractive frontiers underwriting Northern compute fall on people who will never benefit from them. In its current form, digital equity is a colonial relation that is not solved by building data centers in the South but reproduced by them.