Diagnosing the environmental sustainability of the internet might seem, at first, like trying to figure out where the molecules of water in your morning cup of coffee originated. 

Water is constantly evolving, cycling through our environments and often carrying the secrets of the places it last passed through. The internet, in all its complexity, appears to operate in a similar fashion. Every time we log online, we step foot into an incredibly intricate stream of data, often cycled, reused and ever-changing.

While the internet can be defined (though I will not attempt to do that just yet), its environmental impact is only slightly easier to trace than water molecules. 

When we power up our laptops, reach for our phones first thing in the morning, or join a Zoom call, we’re using electrical energy, not just physical or mental energy. 

Powering the internet requires a lot of consistent energy, as does keeping cell towers functional, running data centers, sourcing raw materials and manufacturing those materials into the devices we use daily. 

Despite the constant need for energy, the internet has historically had a relatively minimal environmental impact. But that has all changed very quickly in the past decade.

Our lives are constantly mediated through the internet. Whether we like it or not, the internet often powers our homes and appliances, allows us to make doctor’s appointments and pay our bills. However, our reliance on the internet should come with an understanding of the environmental impact of the technology that fuels it, especially the innovations introduced in recent years. Understanding the environmental impact of the technology we use daily will help us make better decisions about the tech we invest in. 

So, to the question at hand: What is the environmental impact of the internet? I’m sorry to have to give you the ever-frustrating answer: “It depends.” 

Because it does, it really does. How you get online makes a difference, as does your internet usage habits, how often you use AI, how many devices you have and so on. 

But it’s still worth understanding how internet networks affect the Earth, especially as we consume more and more data. Before I fully dive into this, I think it’s important to understand what we mean when we say “the internet” and what we mean when we say “environmental impact.”

Measuring environmental impact: 30-second version

There are a couple of ways to measure environmental impact, though, like trying to trace water droplets in the water cycle, those measurements can quickly become dizzying.

In addition to greenhouse gas emissions (which can be further subdivided into specific categories), we also have to consider water consumption, air pollution, natural resource consumption, energy consumption, waste generation and ecosystem degradation. 

For the purpose of this article, I’ll be looking at the environmental costs holistically for two reasons: 1) There’s limited data on the environmental impact of internet technology and 2) I don’t have the time, honestly, to go into detail with each category, nor the space, as my editors are already begging me to shorten this piece.

The internet, explained: Extremely abridged version

The internet, or broadband, can be understood as the vast interconnected network of data centers, devices and routers, tethered together by an assortment of cables, frequency bands and radio signals. 

This combined category of what we call “the internet” is tucked into an even broader category known as the Information and Communication Technology sector. The term ICT comprises most communication devices and technologies, like radio and television, but also extends to analog technology. 

Edward Oughton, a professor of geographic data science and spatial computing at George Mason University, writes that “the ICT sector accounts for 3.6% of global carbon dioxide emissions” in his paper on broadband sustainability. 

“It’s growing very fast,” Oughton told me of the ICT’s environmental impact. “We still have to connect an extra 2 billion, maybe 3 billion people worldwide to the internet. So all of that’s going to include devices, energy consumption, new networks to be built and, obviously, additional data center capacity.”

Factoring the supply chain into consideration magnifies the environmental impact considerably, as the supply chain typically includes mining for rare materials, chip manufacturing and transportation of those materials. To that point, Apple reports that 99% of its water consumption comes solely from the supply side of its business.

Still, technology, AI and the internet do have the potential to improve the sustainability of ICT and many other industries. In fact, some policy researchers even argue that telecom policy is climate policy.

“ICT has the potential to reduce [global] greenhouse gas emissions by almost 20%,” Joe Rowsell, telecommunication policy expert and Telus’s director of regulatory affairs, told me, echoing the main ideas in Rowsell’s recent policy paper.

“It’s not so frequently thought that ICT and telecom are the foundation of what a lot of industries do,” Rowsell said. “Climate policy makers and decision makers should pay some attention to it.” 

To better understand how the internet affects the Earth, let’s take a closer look at how each major internet connection type fares environmentally.

Internet connection types and how we get online matters

If you’ve kept up with CNET’s broadband team for a while, you know by now that there’s more than one way to get online at home — and our favorite way is through fiber internet.

But despite the preference for fiber (and I’ll get into why most broadband experts prefer it in a bit), the reality is that where we live determines the kind of internet connection we’ll get. We are limited by which internet service providers actually cover our area, and if you live in a rural, remote or hard-to-reach area, you likely won’t get to sign up for fiber internet. 

In fact, according to the latest data from the FCC, 51% of US households do not have access to fiber internet. That means fiber internet isn’t always a realistic option for rural communities. 

Thanks to new technologies in broadband, we can reach remote households with fixed wireless internet, like internet prin satelit sau Internet 5G acasă. Both technologies have soared in popularity recently, with Starlink şi T-Mobile 5G Home Internet standing a notch above industry competition. 

However, fixed wireless internet has higher associated energy costs. And, as in the case of Starlink’s flock of 7,000 (and counting!) LEO satellites, those costs can heavily impact our Earth’s atmosphere and natural resources. 

Understanding how each type of internet technology affects the Earth is key to understanding our internet habits’ ecological footprint.

Let’s get into it.

Fibră

Generally speaking, fiber is the most energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable internet connection type. That is because of the glass (though sometimes plastic) fibers spliced into cables. 

“Nothing’s as good as fiber, because once you’ve got it in the ground,” Oughton said, “it’s these photons traveling in glass. So it’s much lower power.” 

Fiber-optic cables have extremely low operational emissions and can last for a long time, making them an obvious choice for reducing money and environmental costs in the long term. 

The Fiber Broadband Association commissioned a study examining the environmental benefits of using a fiber network. The study found that “the carbon footprint of fiber broadband networks is lower than hybrid fiber coax [cable] networks on every sustainability metric,” including associated costs for materials and operational use.

Additionally, even though the initial deployment of the fiber-optic network may disturb ecosystems or incrementally increase carbon emissions, the study also found that after six years of use, those emissions drop considerably and pay off over time.

“When you put in fiber, you’re putting in the critical infrastructure for the next century…” Gary Bolton, president of the Fiber Broadband Association, told me. “This passive optical network will last a century.”

Cable and DSL

Most households got online using cable şi DSL legacy networks until the introduction of faster technologies like fiber. Both are associated with a much higher energy consumption rate than fiber, largely due to the use of copper wires. 

Cable internet relies on coaxial cables, typically made of solid or woven copper wire covered in sheathings and occasionally enriched with fiber. While cable internet is much faster and more reliable than DSL internet, the technology is still not as fast as fiber. 

Those cables simply don’t have the same bandwidth capacity as fiber-optic cables and don’t perform as well over distances, which equals higher attenuation or loss of signal strength. 

While fiber cables require splitters and amplifiers to transmit data over long distances, those splitters are not always powered. That’s not the case with cable.

“Those [cable] splitters have to be powered, and then the amplifiers for the coax to repeat the signal have to be powered,” Bolton said.

The FBA study found that fiber internet reduces power consumption and carbon emissions by 93% to 96% compared to two common types of cable internet (hybrid-fiber cables and DOCSIS 4.0). 

DSL, which stands for Digital Subscriber Line, is an even worse offender than cable and often can’t deliver speeds higher than 50 to 100 megabits per second. 

“Copper is pretty greenhouse gas emission intensive relative to fiber and relative to cable,” Rowsell said, echoing other industry experts.

The slower speeds and energy inefficiencies have led a lot of subscribers to migrate from DSL to other technologies like satellite internet, if available. Plus, many ISPs are moving toward shutting down DSL services entirely. AT&T announced in December of 2024 that it planned to retire DSL completely, citing the technology as an “energy hog” that is difficult to maintain.

5G internet

5G internet is an increasingly popular alternative to wired internet, and it’s a technology that only continues to improve in efficiency. While 5G is a common alternative to fiber in remote or hard-to-reach places, 5G is associated with higher energy costs for the same amount of transmitted data.

Since 5G relies on frequency bands instead of direct cable transmission, there’s more network congestion and signal loss risk, especially over long distances. As a result, 5G requires more energy, and 5G towers often require diesel generators for backup energy supply.

Oughton’s paper, published in July 2025, highlights the high energy usage of 4G and 5G internet in developing Asia and notes that rural households use more energy overall than urban ones. 

“Whenever you look at these systems and we talk about increasing broadband capacity, whether it’s of a satellite network or of a mobile network,” Oughton said, “you’re always increasing the energy and emissions when you increase that capacity.” 

The spectral efficiency of 5G internet (or how much data we can reasonably transmit over those frequency bands) is a key consideration for its effectiveness and staying power. When the FCC opened up the 6GHz band in 2020 to be used in the latest Wi-Fi standards, it also presented an opportunity for mobile carriers to expand and improve their services, 

“Delivering the connectivity, of course, is absolutely important,” said Alex Roytblat, the vice president of regulatory affairs at the Wi-Fi Alliance. “But then, distributing that connectivity is very much like plumbing. You can deliver lots of water, but if you only have a faucet that can trickle down, then you’re not getting the benefit.” 

For the Wi-Fi Alliance and ISPs using spectrum to deliver internet, making even more unlicensed spectrum available is an essential solution. Doing so might be the key to delivering 5G internet more efficiently and allowing Wi-Fi channels to operate without crowding.

“If the spectrum auctions are delayed relative to international standards, you’re four years behind being able to deploy connectivity and 5G connectivity in urban areas,” said Rowsell.

Internet prin satelit

Like 5G internet, low Earth orbit satellites revolutionized internet accessibility in ways we’re still trying to keep up with. The strength of satellite internet is its wide, encompassing coverage of multiple terrains. You don’t need any cords, cables or established infrastructure to set up the internet: Just a clear view of the sky and a good place for your receiving satellite dish. 

Like all fixed wireless technology, satellites are subject to the whims of the weather and, in some cases, require clearing trees or structures for a good signal. But otherwise, it’s relatively easy to set up anywhere you go, and Starlink’s LEO satellites ensure that you get much faster speeds than what you’d get from legacy satellite providers, like Viasat şi Hughesnet, which use higher-orbiting GEO satellites. 

But there is a catch to the technology: To transmit the strongest signal and offer the most connectivity, you need a lot of LEO satellites in the sky, and those satellites create a lot of emissions.

“Compared to terrestrial mobile broadband, LEO is approximately eight times higher per rural subscriber, or six times higher per remote subscriber, in the baseline emissions scenario,” Oughton and three professors wrote in a paper on LEO megaconstellations in May 2024.

GEO satellites, which orbit 35,000 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, are generally larger than LEO satellites and follow the same orbit of the Earth. LEO satellites, which are much closer to the Earth’s surface, require more satellites for more coverage.

“The issue of GHG emissions has not been a concern for satellite broadband until the emergence of LEO systems,” wrote researchers from UNSW Sydney in a paper from 2020.

LEO satellites also have much shorter lifespans than GEO satellites, meaning that a massive fleet of satellites is required to offer broad coverage, and that fleet has to be periodically replaced with new satellites. The rocket emissions for those satellites are incurred even if the satellites aren’t used, Oughton told me.

The rate of rocket launches has grown exponentially in recent years, with 2024 setting the mark for the highest number of attempted launches in a year at 259. Of those 259 launches, 134 belonged solely to SpaceX. 

In his in-depth article on the sustainability of Starlink satellites, my CNET colleague Joe Supan notes that recent samples of the stratosphere from 2023 already showed a changed composition due to rocket emissions. 

As Starlink and other competitors enter the LEO satellite broadband space, rocket launch emissions and pollution will only increase, posing a greater risk to our ozone. 

“It looks like those LEO constellations are here to stay, whereas a few years ago, we were very much skeptical about whether they were going to,” Oughton told me, referring to the recent shift in BEAD funding toward a satellite-first approach.

Data centers, AI and the environment

When you search for “coffee shops near me” on Google or Safari, you tap a data center with servers that store the information you seek. It happens in seconds, almost instantaneously. 

Data centers are central to the internet’s environmental impact. While they consume a lot of electrical energy, massive amounts of water and have harmful pollutants, those levels have been relatively stable in the past decade.

But you really can’t talk about the internet without talking about AI, in the same way that you can’t Google something without an AI overview. AI has quickly become such a part of our online worlds, and that integration is key to understanding its environmental impact.

The advent of AI has changed how we use the internet, and the AI data centers powering those large language models consume energy at an increasingly alarming rate. Not only are tremendous amounts of water required for cooling these data centers, but the greenhouse gases and pollutants emitted by AI data centers running at full tilt are much more significant than the emissions or pollutants associated with standard data centers. 

Berkeley Lab, which offers the most comprehensive and detailed glimpse into US data center usage, predicts that by 2028, hyperscale and colocation data centers will account for over 90% of server energy consumption, “primarily driven by AI workloads.” 

“If you look at the general or regular cloud services or internet services, the power for each rack of the server is probably five kilowatts, or below 10 kilowatts,” said Shaolai Ren, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside. “But a rack of AI servers could be anywhere between 20 to 30, and even 100 kilowatt power.”

The high energy consumption is primarily due to the power required to generate data, not just retrieve it, like a standard data center server. 

“To make sure the delay is small enough, they need to over-provision their servers,” Ren explained.

Since AI servers run much hotter than a typical server, they require much more water for cooling. In 2023, Google’s data centers consumed over 23 billion liters of freshwater for cooling its servers; for context, that’s just one billion liters shy of PepsiCo.’s reported overall freshwater consumption for the same year. 

“The total annual on-site water consumption by US data centers in 2028 could double or even quadruple the 2023 level, reaching approximately 150 to 280 billion liters and further stressing the water infrastructures,” the 2024 Berkeley Lab report stated. 

AI’s environmental impact has been a topic of increasing concern for researchers like Ren and Mohammad Islam, a computer science and engineering professor at the University of Texas, Arlington, who co-authored a paper on “making AI less thirsty.”

“GPT-3 needs to ‘drink’ (i.e., consume) a 500ml bottle of water for roughly 10 to 50 medium-length responses, depending on when and where it is deployed,” Ren and Islam’s paper reports.

For Ren and Islam, the “when and where” is vital to understanding AI’s growing environmental impact: Water and carbon footprints sometimes have an inverse relationship, and working toward sustainability requires a holistic understanding. 

“You could have a location that consumes a lot of water, but it has very clean energy,” Ren said. “For example, let’s say we build a data center in Arizona using nuclear power, then we have no carbon emissions, but we still need a lot of water.”

Water consumption impacts change with the time of day and the location of the data centers. Fortunately, both metrics are relatively straightforward to consider when building or running a data center.

While it’s unrealistic to move data centers after they’re built, considering colder climates when creating a new data center is an easy way to reduce water cooling usage. To that point, tech companies are increasingly shifting toward opening data centers in colder climates, like Canada, North Dakota sau Norway.

“Data center workloads are very flexible,” Ren said. “You can move the workflows to different places to capture more efficient locations or efficient hours.” 

Air pollution is also a consideration in developing AI data centers, which Ren classifies as a “hidden toll of AI” in his paper written with other researchers from UC Riverside and Caltech. 

“The overall public health costs of US data centers could rival or even exceed those of on-road emissions of the largest US states, such as California,” the paper states. 

As noted in Ren and Islam’s paper on AI’s water consumption, air pollution is not an isolated issue. Particles emitted from one AI data center may immediately impact the surrounding population and nearby places where the pollutants travel.

Elon Musk’s construction of a data center in South Memphis is a strong example: The data center runs on methane gas and emits far more air pollutants than data centers using clean or even electrical energy. While Musk’s Memphis data center may not consume much water, the emissions and air pollutants are a growing concern. Additionally, local regulators and civil rights officials have come forward, asserting that the data center doesn’t have the proper Clean Air Act Permits.

One step toward AI sustainability, according to researchers like Ren and Islam and industry-experts like Markus Kasanmascheff, who has been reporting on tech and Microsoft for over a decade, is transparency. 

“There’s no discussion about this, because it’s the shiny new thing, and it’s cool, and it’s evolving,” Kasanmascheff said. “So people shy away from this, and the impact is very abstract.”

Looking ahead

The internet and AI aren’t going away anytime soon, and as we continue to bridge the broadband divide in the US and countries lacking access, millions more will get online in the coming years.

Trying to understand our individual environmental impact in the face of much larger industry emissions and water usage, like the ones that shape the internet, may seem overwhelming. Those effects are primarily out of one’s control, especially if you live in a rural area where you don’t have access to fiber internet. 

There are solutions to making the internet more sustainable. Oughton and other researchers tout “infrastructure sharing” and a “multi-technology last-mile approach” as a means of making 5G towers more efficient in developing countries. 

Again, deploying internet technology is a potential solution for creating global, sustainable solutions to the industry’s growing environmental impact. 

But that expansion will require, at the very least, more regulation and transparent reporting on emissions and water usage. 

“Regulation is not just a stick, it’s a carrot,” Rowsell said, “and it can encourage you to innovate in ways that match the regulation.” 

Rowsell told me that regulation also needs to come with ways to minimize greenwashing. 

Carbon offsetting, for example, is often touted as a solution to high carbon emissions. So is water replenishment in water-scarce areas — Meta, for instance, reports that it restored 1.5 billion gallons of water to high and medium water stress regions in 2024.

While these efforts are a positive step in the right direction, they don’t fully address the issue of carbon emissions and water consumption. “They should actually focus more on finding ways to run their system better,” Islam said.

“The number one [recommendation] is, again, be more transparent,” Islam told me. “Large companies like OpenAI, Microsoft and Facebook should disclose their energy consumption in data centers and associated water consumption.”

In the meantime, understanding how the internet affects the environment is one step toward making better, conscious choices about the technologies we use every day.