Companies in every sector are investing in artificial intelligence and digital services to create new business value, spurring hundreds of billions of dollars of spending on data center expansion projects by the biggest cloud-services players and co-location providers. 

Those investments will derail corporate emissions goals if they’re not managed properly. Getting ahead of that outcome will take closer collaboration between chief technology or information officers and sustainability leaders.  

“I know it’s not easy to carve out bandwidth to focus on this problem, but I would encourage all of my peers to do this,” said George Maddaloni, chief technology officer, operations at Mastercard.

Mastercard stepped up efforts to more closely manage its digital carbon footprint three years ago, before AI strategy was top of mind for every business executive. In April, the company formally made environmental sustainability one of the key performance indicators reviewed monthly by a new steering committee composed of senior executives, including CSO Ellen Jackowski.

“We started with the data about what we run from a technology perspective, and then looked at how to allocate and assign a footprint to our different products and services based on that,” Maddaloni said.

Growing concern

Information technology accounts for an estimated 2-4 percent of annual global emissions, according to the International Energy Agency — a figure that’s growing rapidly as companies increasingly rely on digital services — with hardware manufacturing, life-cycle management and electricity accounting for the biggest chunks of the total. 

Large tech companies with aggressive emissions reduction goals, including Amazon, Google and Microsoft, are struggling to achieve those targets in large part because of the more than $364 billion they spent this year on data center buildouts.

The potential ripple effect affects sustainability professionals beyond Big Tech. More than 60 percent of the leaders surveyed in August by The Conference Board indicated that data center energy demand was their greatest concern related to their company’s AI investments, followed by the emissions related to the services themselves.

The level of emissions generated by IT infrastructure, including data centers, varies widely from industry to industry. Enterprise technology contributes an estimated 60-65 percent of emissions related to electricity (Scope 2) and upstream and downstream business activities (Scope 3) at banks and financial services firms. For healthcare providers, the average is closer to 10-15 percent of Scope 2 and 3.

Mastercard’s data center footprint represents 60 percent of emissions from its direct operations (Scope 1) and purchased electricity. Those two categories account for 10 percent of its total emissions, which means Mastercard’s data centers contribute 6 percent of the company’s entire carbon footprint.

“This is a material topic for a handful of industries, including financial services,” said Bjoern Stengel, global sustainability practice lead at tech research firm IDC. “With the rise of AI, it became a mainstream topic overnight.”

Best practices for taming digital footprints

Over the past three years, Mastercard has managed to decouple its growth in its payment services from its emissions. In 2024, for example, the company’s revenue grew 12 percent, but Mastercard’s overall emissions decreased 7 percent.

Key to that achievement was the creation of a patent-pending management dashboard that includes real-time electricity consumption of Mastercard’s services (including the percentage that co