corporates
Are the Tech Giants Leading the Way? Big tech in Silicon Valley run businesses that demand many resources, especially energy consumption, as digital growth means a continuing need for more data centers. In their ambitious pledges to reduce emissions, they clean up their supply chains and invest in green technologies.
T
ech giants have huge climate footprints. As a result, they have increased the focus on corporate responsibility for the past few years. Thus, the green transition is a part of the largest corporates’ agenda, as they are actively looking for ways to reduce emissions in their entire supply chains, and some are also actively removing carbon. In the past two decades, a great amount of the world’s wealth has been accumulated by a small handful of companies present in Silicon Valley. Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, also known as ‘Big Tech’ or ‘GAMMA’,
have a combined market cap of around 7.3 trillion USD. Roughly speaking, that is equivalent to 43 “Novo Nordisk” companies - Denmark’s most valuable company to date. If the five GAMMA companies decided to form a nation, it would be the 3rd largest economy in the world. With these tech companies being some of the largest economic powerhouses in the world, their success also brings with it large energy demands due to the massive growth in hyper scale datacenters that a global increasing data demand spurs. The impact of how these tech giants act and how fast they drive their
transition is considerable – both regarding their emissions, their supply chains, and their position as industry leaders.
FACTS Amazon emitted 51.17 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2019*. By comparison, the City of Copenhagen emitted 1.55 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2018*. Thus, the carbon footprint of Amazon compares to 33 times the City of Copenhagen. * https://www.environmentalleader.com/2020/02/facebookranks-1-on-list-of-top-10-large-energy-buyers-in-the-us/
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