China's major cloud computing and datacenter players aren't going green in a hurry, according to a Greenpeace study - leaving Microsoft tied to a datacenter operator that uses just 4.35 percent renewable energy.

The org's latest Clean Cloud research [PDF] considered China's ten cloud providers and 15 of its biggest datacenter operators, which collectively accounted for over 52 percent of China's Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market in the first half of 2023, and over 60 percent of the internet datacenter market in 2022.

The group found that just eight - Tencent, ByteDance, Kuaishou Technology, GDS, VNET Group, Chindata Group, Shanghai AtHub, and Bohao Internet Data Services - have announced plans to operate entirely on renewable energy by 2030.

The study also found that Alibaba Group had committed to using 100 percent for Alibaba Cloud, and that Alibaba Group purchased 1.61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of renewable energy in 2023. Tencent has reported its contracts for renewable energy topped 1.3 billion kWh in 2024.

90 percent of providers considered have deployed solar distributed photovoltaic projects at their datacenters or operational buildings, and a dozen in the ranking have participated in green power trading.

But some are yet to use many renewables. The study found Baidu uses renewables for 5.11 percent of its energy needs, and VNET Group - operator of Microsoft 365 in China - uses just 4.35 percent renewables.

VNET has, however, set carbon neutrality targets for scope 1 and 2 emissions, which cover energy sources an entity chooses to consume like fuel for vehicles and electricity for facilities. Twelve of the 13 companies considered have done so.

The report points out that this state of affairs is concerning, because Chinese policy calls for local tech companies to do better. Also because the Middle Kingdom's compute fleet is growing fast: as we reported earlier this week, the country is on track to add 70 exaFLOPS of compute capacity in the next 18 months. Doing so will require untold megawatts of energy, and the greener that is the better for us all.

Greenpeace is calling for China's clouds and datacenter operators to be more transparent in future reporting. Good luck with that, folks. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/07/12/greenpeace_china_clean_cloud_report/