| That is certainly true of most consumer devices i.e. phones and laptops. For example Dell estimate that 85% of the lifetime emissions for their XPS systems come from manufacture [1] and Apple claim 79% for an 14 inch macbook. For beefy desktops or servers using hundreds of watts on a continuous basis the situation is rather different e.g [3] which is a Dell estimate for a Precision 7000 series tower showing 74% of emissions attributed to use. This makes sense: if we assume 700kg of carbon emissions to construct a server, but 300W of continuous power draw during use (seems fairly conservative, especially including cooling) then with the US grid intensity of 0.39 kg CO2e/kWh we find that the manufacturing emissions match the usage emissions over ~250 days of use. Of course the actual numbers depend heavily on precise circumstances; a data center in an area with less carbon intensive electricity will have a correspondingly lower carbon footprint. So _as a consumer_ it's true that the biggest contribution is not directly in the usage of the (local) device, but in creating that device in the first place: you're almost always better off keeping a device for longer rather than replacing it with a more power efficient one. But on the server side that isn't the case: the emissions due to operating the data center are also substantial. Plus increased demand on the server side also increases the number of servers manufactured and deployed. Historically improved hardware power efficiency has meant that carbon emissions have increased slower than compute. So I'm somewhat skeptical when I see articles claiming huge factor increases in the overall carbon intensity of the internet in the near term. _However_ that's not a law of nature, and new technologies that cause a step change in demand for server-side compute could indeed dramatically increase the carbon emissions of the internet. [1] https://www.dell.com/en-uk/dt/corporate/social-impact/advanc...
[2] https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/notebooks/14-...
[3] https://www.dell.com/en-uk/dt/corporate/social-impact/advanc... |