Ask someone about AI’s carbon footprint and they’ll usually gesture at "data centers" and move on. Ask them how much water one chatbot session uses, and most people go quiet. It’s a strange gap for an industry that prides itself on measuring everything.
A single GenAI exchange, the kind most of us run dozens of times a day, can pull half a liter of fresh water through a data center’s cooling systems. Multiply that by global AI demand, and researchers at UC Riverside project 4.2 to 6.6 billion cubic meters of water withdrawal by 2027. That’s more than Denmark uses in a year. Not a hypothetical. A projection based on current adoption curves.
IT leaders are starting to feel this land on their desks in a different way than expected — not as a compliance checkbox, but as a question buyers now ask before signing a contract. What’s your energy sourcing? How efficient is your cloud infrastructure? What happens to hardware when it’s retired? These aren’t ESG department questions anymore. They’re procurement questions.
The environmental impact of IT: How technology shapes sustainability, walks through where that footprint actually comes from — data centers, hardware manufacturing, e-waste, operational inefficiency — and what leadership structures separate companies that talk about sustainability from ones that operationalize it, including a look at how Zoho Corp. has approached it internally.
This article was originally published on ManageEngine Academy.