Along a dusty country road leading to ATL4, a massive new data center under construction east of Atlanta, the sight of dozens of cars and pickups parked haphazardly on narrow dirt shoulders is common. The out-of-state license plates are a clear sign of the skilled tradespeople from across the country who have descended on the site for one of the largest construction projects in the area. With the global battle for artificial intelligence (AI) dominance driving tech companies, utilities, and governments to invest upwards of US $1 trillion into capital expansion, data centers have become the critical infrastructure underpinning this competition. In this new era, data centers serve as the bunkers, factories, and laboratories of AI, powered by a seemingly insatiable need for concrete and electricity.

At first glance, the data industry might appear to be intangible, with its products existing as weightless bits and bytes. But standing next to the bustling construction site for DataBank’s ATL4, the enormity of the physical labor and materials involved is striking. The most prominent material in sight? Concrete—poured, pre-fabricated, and stacked in vast quantities. Big data is, quite literally, big concrete. And this poses a major challenge: concrete’s heavy environmental toll.

Concrete, a core ingredient in data centers and the energy plants that fuel them, is also one of the largest contributors to climate change. As the most widely produced material on Earth, concrete accounts for roughly 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions, with cement—its key binder—being the primary culprit. In fact, the growing demand for data centers is driving a surge in concrete use, threatening to derail the tech industry’s ambitious carbon neutrality goals.

For instance, last year, Microsoft saw a 30% rise in carbon emissions, largely due to the construction of new data centers. Google’s greenhouse gas emissions have increased by almost 50% over the past five years. The proliferation of these data hubs is so significant that Morgan Stanley projects data centers will release about 2.5 billion tonnes of CO2 annually by 2030—roughly 40% of the United States’ total emissions.

Despite these setbacks, there is hope. As AI and the construction of these massive data centers continue to boost emissions, the reinvention of concrete could play a pivotal role in reducing their carbon impact. In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on developing more sustainable concrete solutions, driven by both profit motives and scientific innovation. From CO2 capture technology at cement plants to more climate-friendly formulas for cement, researchers and companies are exploring multiple avenues to reduce concrete’s environmental footprint.

I visit the ATL4 construction site where Tony Qorri, head of construction at DataBank, walks me through the building process. This new data center, along with four other projects underway in the Atlanta area, will add 133,000 square meters (about 1.44 million square feet) of space to the region’s data-center capacity. Each of these centers follows a universal design optimized for rapid construction and scalability. Prefabricated concrete panels, columns, and structural elements are trucked in daily, assembled with precision, and wired by hundreds of electricians—all within tight timelines. In the high-stakes race for AI supremacy, every delay can be costly.

Currently, the United States is home to over 5,000 data centers, and that number is expected to grow by 450 annually through 2030. Globally, there are now more than 10,000 data centers, and analysts project the construction of another 26.5 million square meters of floor space in the next five years. In metro Atlanta, projects like Microsoft’s upcoming 186,000-square-meter complex, which will house 100,000 servers and consume 324 megawatts of electricity, represent the scale of the data-center boom.

Despite the push to develop greener solutions, the industry’s current mantra is simple: Build, baby, build. “There’s no good substitute for concrete in these projects,” says Aaron Grubbs, a structural engineer working on ATL4. The latest processors are bigger, heavier, hotter, and more power-hungry than ever before, which means even more concrete columns are necessary to support the infrastructure.

Though concrete might seem an unlikely hero in the conversation about digital infrastructure, it is the bedrock of our modern electrical and telecommunications systems. Without it, the vast web of power generation, distribution, and data storage could not exist. Even as advances in microelectronics, superconductivity, and chip design continue to shrink the size of individual computing components, Qorri believes that the need for physical space in data centers is only going to grow. “I’ve seen these changes before,” he says. “The need for space just keeps expanding.”

Concrete itself isn’t inherently carbon-intensive by weight—steel, for example, produces much more CO2 per kilogram than cement. However, the construction industry consumes a staggering 35 billion tonnes of concrete each year, and the sheer volume of the material used creates significant emissions. With concrete accounting for about twice the weight of all other building materials combined, its widespread use poses both an environmental challenge and a barrier to change.

But change is happening. The Swiss materials giant Holcim, for instance, is spearheading efforts to decarbonize cement and concrete. During a visit to their innovation center in Lyon, France, researchers showed me a database of nearly 1,000 companies working on ways to reduce concrete’s carbon footprint. Although these technologies have yet to make a substantial impact on global emissions, there is hope that the construction boom in data centers—and related infrastructure such as nuclear power plants and offshore wind farms—will push green cement beyond pilot plants and research labs and into full-scale production.

To understand why cement production is so carbon-intensive, it’s important to differentiate between cement and concrete. Cement is the powdered binder that holds concrete together, while concrete is the mixture of cement, sand, aggregates, and water that hardens into a solid mass. The most common form of cement, Portland cement, is made by heating limestone in a kiln to create clinker, which is then ground into a fine powder. The heating process releases significant CO2, making cement production one of the largest sources of industrial carbon emissions.

The challenge is compounded by the fact that cement producers typically build plants near limestone quarries, where the raw material is readily available. Although some innovations in concrete production, such as incorporating alternative binders or capturing CO2 from the process, show promise, these methods are still in the early stages of development. For now, the construction of data centers continues to rely on traditional methods, even as the industry pushes for cleaner alternatives.

While the growth of data centers and the associated demand for concrete may seem at odds with global sustainability goals, the rise of low-carbon concrete presents an opportunity. With tech giants like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft pledging to reduce emissions in their data centers, the market for green concrete is expanding rapidly. If these efforts can drive innovation and accelerate the development of more sustainable materials, the construction boom fueled by AI and big data might one day become part of the solution to climate change, rather than its cause.

The road to a greener, low-carbon future may be long, but with billions of dollars being poured into new data infrastructure, the stakes have never been higher. The future of concrete—and the future of our planet—may depend on it.

By Impact Lab