Alibaba’s fintech arm Ant Group has unveiled plans to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 30% in the next five years in a major step towards its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2030.
The decarbonization plans come as major Chinese tech firms such as Tencent and Huawei have rolled out similar initiatives in response to a government call for companies to use green technologies to reduce carbon emissions.
Ant will encourage its data centers to use energy-saving technologies like liquid cooling to achieve lower power usage effectiveness (PUE), a measure of the ratio of a data center’s energy usage to the amount of energy consumed by the center’s IT equipment, the company said in a WeChat post on Thursday.
Meanwhile, Ant aims to raise the share of renewable energy in the total power consumption at its data centers to 30% by 2025, according to the post.
Data centers are considered as a major source of carbon emissions for Ant as the facilities require plenty of energy to keep cool.
Last month, Ant announced plans to become carbon neutral by 2030. To achieve the goal, the company said that it will establish a fund to fund research and development of renewable energy and other green technologies, modify its existing buildings for higher energy efficiency and construct new facilities in accordance with China’s green building standards.
In January this year, Tencent said that it will use its artificial intelligence and cloud computing technologies to reduce carbon emissions in its office buildings and data centers.
Tencent claimed the top spot among cloud services providers in China in terms of renewable power use, beating Alibaba, which fell to fourth place this year from first place last year, according to Greenpeace East Asia’s latest clean energy scorecard for China’s tech sector.
Contact reporter Ding Yi (yiding@caixin.com)
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