Big Tech has a big cloud problem. From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Jamali. The thing we call the cloud might sound harmless but that seemingly abstract place where the details

of your digital life gets stored takes a heavy toll on the environment.

No this cloud isn't something floating in the air. It is millions of

individual servers running in thousands of giant data warehouses around the

world. We're outsourcing more of our data storage and everyday

computing there all the time. If the servers fail you might lose access to your

emails, your precious photos, or that presentation you're editing with colleagues in real time and so these

servers run 24-7 which takes a lot of power and other resources too. Stephen Gonzales

Moncerate is a postdoctoral researcher at Goate University in Frankfurt

Germany where he studies cloud data centers and what they're doing to the

planet. Cloud is a metaphor but what and what we really are

we really are referring to is a vast set of infrastructures that are mostly

based on the ground that are threaded through the ocean and

fiber optic cables and undersea network of cables and satellites and cellular towers

are supplementary to that, but the primary signal traffic is still happening on the ground and under the ocean.

If we use the metaphor of a cloud, we don't think of clouds as something that is polluting. In fact,

clouds are a symbol of nature. They're a symbol of a world in balance, not a world

that is tipping out of balance. You know, cloud data facilities have you very real environmental impacts can you talk about

first of all the large carbon footprint. How big is that carbon footprint? Is there a way to quantify it globally? The electricity

consumed by data centers, you know, does contribute a significant carbon

footprint. For data centers specifically, it's something in the order of

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