ByteDance trails Tencent and Alibaba on climate goals and renewable energy use, Greenpeace says
- ByteDance is seventh in Greenpeace East Asia’s latest climate ranking of China’s nine cloud providers
- While Chinese technology companies are making rapid progress towards cutting carbon emissions, there is room for further improvement, non-profit says
The company ranked seventh among nine cloud providers, as it is yet to announce carbon neutrality goals or disclose its energy usage data.
The report, released on Tuesday, clubbed together nine cloud providers and 15 data centre operators, which account for more than 80 per cent and 78 per cent of China’s public cloud and data centre markets, respectively.
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What is China doing about climate change?
“ByteDance is not keeping up with its peers in China when it comes to climate commitments and renewable energy use,” said Ye Ruiqi, Greenpeace East Asia’s climate and energy project manager based in Beijing. “Tech giants like Tencent and GDS [Holdings] have set ambitious targets and are starting to procure renewable energy at scale, but ByteDance has not even disclosed the greenhouse gas emissions from its own operations.”
China’s data centres and related infrastructure have become a major source of energy consumption and carbon emissions. In 2020, data centres and 5G networks in China together consumed 201 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, roughly the same as the combined consumption in Beijing and Shenzhen. Carbon emissions from the nation’s digital infrastructure are projected to reach 310 million tonnes in 2035 from 123 million in 2020, according to a separate Greenpeace last year.