What is Salesforce’s Green Plan for AI's Data Centre Impact?

Salesforce has released its AI Sustainability Outlook, warning that artificial intelligence could place increasing strain on global data centre infrastructure unless the sector prioritises sustainable design and operations.

“As a leader in agentic AI, it is Salesforce's imperative to ensure that AI is trusted, reliable and sustainable," Sunya Norman, SVP Impact at Salesforce, says in a post on LinkedIn.

“In this outlook, we explore the current landscape, our efforts and evolving insights so far and our preliminary path forward.

“We’re early in the journey, but the future is being shaped now.

“By sharing our progress openly, we aim to spark transparency and inspire collective action.

“A sustainable future with AI is within reach and I’m optimistic about what we can achieve together.”

The environmental cost of AI

The report projects that AI-related data centres could account for around 3% of global electricity consumption by 2030, driven by high compute requirements and sophisticated cooling systems. 

Gartner predicts that 40% of AI data centre projects could face power bottlenecks as early as 2027, risking delays, cost increases and power reliability issues.

Currently, 56% of data centre energy is supplied by fossil fuels.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) warns that without a shift to clean energy, data centres could become the fastest-growing source of global emissions.

AI workloads also consume large volumes of water for cooling, with one fifth of data centre water use coming from stressed watersheds.

Building AI compute infrastructure also demands critical minerals like lithium and copper.

Mining these resources is both energy and water intensive, creating emissions and environmental degradation.

AI as a sustainability tool

Salesforce highlights that while data centres powering AI have an environmental footprint, the technology itself can advance sustainability.

The IEA estimates AI solutions could cut energy-related emissions by 5% by 2035.

AI can optimise predictive maintenance, integrate renewable energy, provide personalised energy insights and improve climate modelling.

In water management, it can support smart irrigation, optimise wastewater treatment and monitor water quality.

Salesforce’s own AI innovation, Agentforce, is being applied to projects with measurable environmental benefits.

Good360, for example, is building a resource matching agent to automate aid distribution during natural disasters.

Stephane Moulec, Chief Technology Officer at Good360, says: “Globally, a significant amount of goods that could be matched to disaster survivors end up going to the landfill.

“Good360 is here to change that.”

Rare is developing an AI-powered regenerative agriculture coach, offering real-time guidance to farmers based on local crop, weather and environmental data, aiming to reduce staff time by 40%. 

Groundswell is deploying AI to scale community solar, helping 30,000 households cut energy costs by half.

Salesforce’s three-pillar strategy

Salesforce outlines three core pillars for managing AI’s environmental impact: smart demand, efficiency and clean supply.

Under smart demand, the company advises selecting AI tools based on the project’s needs and avoiding unnecessary use of resource-intensive models.

Transparency with customers on when and how data centres consume power is encouraged, alongside incentives for efficiency.

On efficiency, Salesforce promotes the use of smaller, purpose-built AI models which can outperform general-purpose models in speed and resource use.

Techniques such as quantisation, distillation and pruning can lower compute requirements without reducing quality. Smaller models running on smaller devices can reduce the load on large data centres.

For clean supply, Salesforce recommends embedding sustainability in procurement, sourcing from environmentally responsible suppliers and investing in renewable energy and sustainable water resources.

It also calls for advocating policy and infrastructure changes to address AI’s environmental impact at scale.

By combining targeted AI use, optimised model design and clean power sourcing, Salesforce argues that the data centre industry can support AI growth while reducing its environmental footprint.