will either not come forward or will come forward more slowly because of the cloud. woman sings and how social media like this can be as bad for the planet as long—distance flights. i think the danger is wejust keep everything. so there's data just building up and building up and building up. we all love using the cloud, but where is it? you see there is no facilities on the trail, it's just pure nature all the way. so it's just kind of woods, fjords and mountains? yeah. the cloud is the vast network of computers that stores our data and helps make the internet work. and it's hidden away in unlikely places. so you see that nature is changing now, there's less trees. the main thing you need to know about the cloud is it's greedy. wherever it goes, it needs vast amounts of power and water. if you were looking for the perfect place to put the cloud, you would struggle to find a better place than this. a norwegian mountain range — fjords full of water and a green electricity supply. they power and cool the computer servers the cloud needs. it might look like a villain�*s secret lair, but this is part of the cloud. welcome. thank you. it's quite a place! it is an amazing place. extraordinary. i'm richard. pleased to meet you. welcome. nice to meet you as well. this bunker near stavanger was built to store weapons for nato. now it stores data. and you can hear the bustling above us. here is the high—voltage transformers delivering power to the data centre. they like power, don't they, data centres? we... it's a power—intensive industry. we need a lot of power. this is one of thousands of data centres around the world. i can feel the power! it'sjust so much noise. it's not expected, but it's so loud. there's the fans and the servers. there's loads going on. it's like being in a massive data factory. these servers hold important safety data for a major car manufacturer. they mustn't fail. so everything has a backup. two banks of servers, two power supplies — red and green, two water cooling systems. double the water, double the power. wow. very warm in here. let me explain why it's so warm. these are the back of the servers. you can see them all flashing away. now, each one of these is pumping out heat and there are a0 servers in there and a0 servers in there, and hundreds and thousands all the way down here. worldwide, the cloud relies on a network of millions and millions of computer servers. we have been inside a data room today, and if i switch off the power to that data room, we have 20,000 people that are not able to work. they need those servers, the application that is running on those servers, in order to do their daily work. do you think the environmental footprint of data centres is going to become a big issue? i think it is a big issue today because we're an industry that is growing. everything is getting digitalised. even up here in norway, with almost ideal conditions, the use of power is staggering. at full capacity, the data centre uses the same amount of electricity as more than 100,000 homes. most countries don't have mountains that they can hollow out, but everywhere has data. and those two things that data centres need — power and cooling — are becoming global environmental problems. the word �*cloud', it feels quite ethereal and almost unreal. and i think that contributes to people not thinking of it as a physical entity with actual impacts, actual energy use, actual carbon emissions. so in that sense, the word is also quite dangerous. think about how many times you use the cloud. it's quickly become indispensable. everything from pictures of me and my family to exactly what i watch, what i buy. everything's online. i own very few physical things. it's all the cloud? all the cloud. everything's on the cloud. literally all of the photos that i take, the music that i listen to. erm... god. now that you think about it, it's literally everything, isn't it? i'm at uni at the moment, - so all my documents that i use, any assignments, j netflix, youtube. lguess like. — instagram, snapchat, tiktok. a lot of stuff. yeah, a lot of stuff, yeah. the cloud has changed the way we live. working from home and online meetings cut travel and save energy. but using the cloud creates greenhouse gases too. as a rough comparison, research suggests a five—minute internet search uses around as much energy as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea. internet search is a really good example because an internet search relies on all the infrastructure, the part that's unseen. and the figures are contested. there is some uncertainty around them. but somewhere there's a machine that's doing all the analysis of the data and all the indexing, which allows the search to be then done rapidly. there's machinery under the surface doing that on your behalf, and each of that has a carbon cost. many in the industry say an online search is nowhere near as bad as boiling a kettle. but what's not disputed is our huge internet usage creates significant greenhouse gases. take our love of viral videos. music plays keyboard cat was one of the first. woman sings laughing baby here has been watched almost 400 million times. and this is the most—watched youtube video of all time. # baby shark... baby shark has been watched 12 billion times. that is a lot of computer power. then there's the films and boxsets we stream... ..and the huge amounts of commercial, government and research data. now, the estimates vary, but, globally, the cloud is thought to be responsible for between a quarter and 1.5% of all greenhouse gas emissions. that's at least 100 million tonnes a year. in some ways, you could say don't get too fixated by the numbers. you can see the trends, and the trends are very clear. we know it's significant. there's enough data out there to act on. this vast, power—hungry industry didn't even exist two decades ago. it's growing all the time to keep up with demand. right now, we're in the hyperx arena here in las vegas, inside the luxor casino and hotel. we are about to get started with our mario kart tournament saturday night speedway. in this world, then, how big is the cloud? how important is it? 0bviously, cloud saves are really important when it comes to saving your data or your settings, all your characters. all that stuff gets pulled. it's all on the cloud? yeah. chatter and here, it's not just the gameplay that happens on the cloud. the gaming and the events in here is also being streamed over the internet through the cloud, so thousands of people at home can watch what's going on here, and gaming in the united states is more popular to watch than many television stations. gaming is one reason why america's data centres now use about 2% of the country's entire electricity supply. do you ever worry about the environmental impact of the cloud? it takes a ton of ac, it takes a ton of water, it takes a lot of energy. but i haven't, like, dug anything further into it, or i haven't had to. do you ever wonder about the environmental consequences of using the cloud? i mean, it takes electricity to run all the computers and the storage on the back end, but, otherwise, it seems like a fairly clean industry. from here in vegas, you don't have to travel far to see where the cloud comes to earth. there are more than a0 data centres built or planned in arizona's salt river valley. this one is run by apple. google has been given permission for a data centre here. a new electricity substation has been built just to power it. and this is being built for facebook. so this is a big chunk of desert that's just been transformed into an absolutely enormous data centre. this is meta, so that's facebook. look at the size of it. look at the scale of it. wow. if you look over there, you can see where the... cos these things need a lot of power, and that's where the power is going to come in. that is some site. people don't understand what the cloud is. they look in the sky and say, "it's got to be up there somewhere." but in reality, these are large storage facilities. and the growth, the projected growth in data centres for the next five years is tremendous. there are data centres here that have been given water allowances of more than a billion litres a year. that's enough to fill an 0lympic—sized swimming pool every day. and that's a big ask in the desert. take the colorado river, which supplies about a0 million people in this part of the us. it flows through the hoover dam. look at the white water mark. it shows how far water levels have dropped in a0 years. the reservoir is barely a quarterfull. the walls are just so exposed. it's a really dramatic example of how much water has kind ofjust gone from the system. the water level�*s falling because of drought and climate change. data centres aren't causing the shortage, but they're a new pressure on the dwindling supply. today, we've been talking about data processing centres and how much water they could potentially use within the colorado river basin, which is honestly... teal lehto uses tiktok to campaign about water issues. it's astonishing. yeah, it's really terrifying seeing how far the water levels have gone down. how do you feel about data centres moving in here and bringing with them demands for more water? i think that we need to instil an ethic of water conservation in every industry within the basin, regardless of how important that industry is or how many people it serves. it needs to be using the least amount of water possible to operate. i just think that every industry, including the cloud, needs to be focused on water conservation if they're going to be operating within one of the most arid regions of the united states. the us government has ordered a 20% cut in the amount of water arizona can take from the colorado river this year. but cities like mesa are welcoming data centres. how can you promise them that they'll have water? through smart conservation efforts that we've done over the years, mesa... each city here in the valley has their own different water situations. ours is very strong. and i also think about everybody�*s use of phones and different devices, and that storage has to go somewhere. the city authorities say most of the data centres will use air cooling. they would use less water but more electricity. the big tech companies say they are reducing water consumption here and using other rivers, and that globally they promise to replenish as much water as they use in all of their data centres. they say they're funding projects around the world to recycle and preserve water. companies are making up for their water consumption in some other part of the world. it's like, well, no, this is the desert where you had the impact. you should be working on zero water where the impact is occurring. i would say that it's really... it's important to recognise that it's, in the end, it's one system. and what are the companies doing about power? well, some of them say they are already carbon—neutral because of their use of renewable energy sources and offsetting. that's funding environmental projects like tree planting that balance out their emissions of carbon. we should all be very suspicious of these synthetic accounting exercises because often what they mean in paper is very different to what they mean in the real world. a lot of the industry are trying to do the right thing. a lot of the cloud infrastructure companies are building things like wind farms, they're building solarfarms. that's really positive and we should encourage that. but it doesn't mean that you're not releasing any emissions. in some places, the clouds hunger for power is putting communities under pressure, as data centres demand more and more. this is county clare in the west of ireland. a site near ennis looks set to become the country's latest data centre. the company behind it hasn't been made public, but its centre would cover ias acres. it's huge. it's two storeys high. it uses massive amounts of electricity. the developers say it's sustainable. campaigners have appealed, and say the electricity could power 200,000 homes. i think the big picture is that things do have to change. it's completely unsustainable to continue on this path of growth, growth, growth, and especially with data centres who use an awful lot of fossil fuel energy at the moment, as well as water. and those are very precious resources. for a new industry, the clouds impact in ireland has been remarkable. now there are more than 70 data centres, and they use ia% of the country's electricity. if the rise in data centres goes unchecked, then by 2030, 30% of all of ireland's power will go into the cloud. that would mean the cloud consuming about as much electricity as all households in ireland. for us here in ireland, these consequences are physically around us. the cloud isn't up there. it's right here, around us in dublin. and that has implications for our energy infrastructure here in the country, and importantly for our environmental policies here as well. drive around and you can see how the cloud is taking over some parts of dublin. so that's like a whole data area, is it? yeah. so you can see all those buildings. i mean, they're enormous. madeleinejohansson is the dublin councillor who tried to stop the cloud. you see up here... yep. ..that. that's one, is it, there? that's one, there. big, isn't it? she persuaded her council to ban new data centres. out of the 77 or so data centres nationally in ireland, 3a are here in south dublin county. that's just a huge amount of them and that's putting a lot of pressure on the infrastructure here. and i just saw that and realised that this can't just keep continuing, you know? the irish government overturned the ban because it says data centres bring substantial economic benefits. but even the national power operator has warned the country is struggling to cope. the last year alone, we have added the equivalent of over 200,000 homes' worth of electricity to a power system that's already on its knees. there comes a time when you just need to press the pause button, reflect, and try and find a line of sight out of this crisis. and i think that's where we are at the moment. and the impact of the cloud on people's lives is becoming an issue in the uk as well. like at this big industrial estate in slough to the west of london. it's now home to more than 30 data centres. when you're on the ground in slough, you know, it looks like there are loads of big kind of data centre—shaped buildings knocking about. but when you actually look on a map, you can see the impact the cloud is having in this kind of really small area. if you look at the places on here, there's a big centre here on one side of the road, a big centrejust over the road, another one over the road from that. very big warehouses, all for data, all in a very small area. they all need water. last summer, millions of thames water customers had a hosepipe ban. but iao data centres still got their supply. thames says it's now reviewing the centres' water consumption. this is staines in west london. data centres are moving in, and that means there's not enough power to go around. new homes were put on hold because of the cloud. developers were told by planners they could be delayed for years. data centres have definitely stifled the delivery of housing and the speed at which we can deliver new housing in this part of the capital. we're looking at potentially thousands of new homes that will either not come forward or will come forward more slowly because of the cloud and because of these data centres in this part of england. the greater london authority has confirmed that data centres are restricting the amount of electricity available for new homes in the london area. but it says it has a plan in place to deal with the problem. it's a part of london that really needs affordable housing. and the idea that this was because of the data centres, because of the cloud was kind of completely out of left—field for us. so, there's a clear problem we're all causing. take your phone... in the uk, we take around 900 pictures each year and leave most of them on the cloud. most of us don't delete old messages... ..or old emails. they are stored forever. the cloud has a lot ofjunk. i think the danger is wejust keep everything. absolutely everything is stored these days... forever. forever! 0n the off—chance it might be useful, and it applies to everything. so there's data just building up and building up and building up. we can'tjust keep doing this forever. we know where it's heading, and it's not good. i have so many dumb photos on my phone. i have photos of, you know, groceries i want my husband to pick up. and yet i rarely go through all of the photos that are being automatically stored on the cloud and delete them, which i should do because i'm worried about the water footprint of those photos. i'm worried about the carbon footprint, too. i think most people have no idea. as we use the cloud more, the pressure on resources will grow. so, do we need to change? i think the genie has got out of the bottle. we're not going to go back to the stone age. and a lot of the stuff is wonderful, it's good fun, it's necessary for ourjobs. i think what we can all do in terms of personal responsibility is keep an eye on our usage, but more importantly, just campaign for more green energy within the data centre in the cloud industry. there are so many positives to the cloud. # blue skies smiling at me # nothing but blue sky... but it is not a harmless resource. our use comes at a price. the enormous growth of the cloud and the ever—increasing demand for data storage and data centres and all that they need to function, it poses pretty fundamental questions about how we keep up with that demand. it's all very well and good to complain about the cloud being up there or out here or whatever, but it serves us, so in many ways we are part of the challenge that needs to be addressed as well. # nothing but blue skies... the cloud is the environmental problem we are all making worse. everything we do online depends on an enormous power and water—guzzling network that never switches off. this is bbc news. i'm monika plaha. our top stories: four days on from the earthquakes, 20,000 people are now known to have died in turkey and syria. still, relatives hope their loved ones might emerge alive. i tried to, yesterday, to dig, myself, but you can't. you see the concrete like this, it pushes. we have no power to lift this. this was an entire neighbourhood and it is completely destroyed. hundreds of apartments, thousands of people and the majority of them are still buried. we'll hear from doctors looking after the syrian baby born in the rubble. in other news, nicaragua frees more than 200 opposition political prisoners and deports them to the united states.

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