AI data centres could unleash a toxic e-waste tsunami by 2050

The News

The hardware powering the AI boom will leave behind far more toxic junk than anyone has been counting, according to a report published on 16 September by the Basel Action Network (BAN), a nonprofit that tracks the global trade in hazardous waste.

BAN's headline projection is stark. Electronic equipment retired because of AI between 2025 and 2050 could add up to between 395 and 617 million metric tonnes of e-waste by the middle of the century. That works out to roughly 8.6 million to 13.1 million tonnes discarded every year. Stacked into 40-foot shipping containers, the 2050 total would fill some 23 million of them, enough to circle the planet six times.

The reason the figure dwarfs earlier estimates is scope. Past studies mostly counted servers and GPUs, which BAN says overlooks about 87 percent of a data centre's electro-mechanical guts. Its own tally folds in power supply and distribution gear, cooling systems, backup power and networking kit, plus a category it labels "AI Waste Contagion" covering telecom infrastructure and personal devices that get junked early as AI advances. Working from a rule of thumb of 70,000 tonnes of waste per gigawatt of capacity, and a McKinsey projection of up to 219GW of data-centre capacity by 2030, BAN pins 15 to 20 percent of the world's exploding e-waste pile on AI.

Why It Matters

Today, less than a quarter of the 68.3 million tonnes of e-waste generated worldwide each year is formally collected and recycled. The rest largely disappears into informal scrapyards where burning and burying releases lead, chromium and other toxins. BAN expects global e-waste to triple to as much as 211 million tonnes a year by 2050, and the AI slice is the fastest-growing part of that.

"AI may feel weightless," BAN founder Jim Puckett said, warning that without planning the buildout could become a "cataclysmic toxic waste crisis". The concern lands as the industry sells AI as a clean, near-immaterial technology. The last comparable reckoning came in 2024, when scrutiny of data centres' water and power draw pushed hyperscalers into sustainability disclosures. Hardware disposal is the next line item set to move from footnote to boardroom risk.

Indian Angle

For India, this is not a distant Western problem. The country already ranks among the world's top three e-waste generators, behind China and the United States, and its formal recycling rate remains low, with much of the load handled by informal hubs in places such as Seelampur and Moradabad. Layering a fast-growing AI data-centre industry on top of that base is precisely the scenario BAN is warning about.

India's operational data-centre capacity has crossed the gigawatt mark and is forecast to more than double by the end of the decade, driven by data-localisation rules under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act and heavy capex from Adani, Reliance's Yotta, CtrlS, NTT and the global cloud majors. On BAN's arithmetic, every gigawatt of that build implies about 70,000 tonnes of eventual waste.

That puts the spotlight on India's E-Waste (Management) Rules, 2022, and their Extended Producer Responsibility regime, which now sets floor prices for recycling certificates. Investors weighing data-centre plays should treat end-of-life hardware as a real cost, not an externality. Regulators at MeitY and the CPCB face a choice: tighten EPR enforcement now, or let a decade of server refresh cycles overwhelm a system that already leaks.

FAQ

Who produced this estimate?

The Basel Action Network, a US-based nonprofit focused on the international trade in hazardous and electronic waste, published the report on 16 September 2026. It expands the count beyond servers to the full supporting infrastructure of a data centre.

Why is the new number so much higher?

Earlier studies looked mainly at servers and accelerators. BAN says that misses roughly 87 percent of a data centre's electro-mechanical equipment. A 2024 study had put AI e-waste at 1.2 to 5 million tonnes by 2030, far below BAN's broader tally.

What does this mean for Indian data-centre investors?

Hardware disposal is becoming a quantifiable liability. With India's capacity set to more than double, EPR obligations and recycling costs should be modelled into project returns rather than ignored, especially for long-dated data-centre and REIT investments.

Where can I read the original announcement?

The findings were first reported by The Verge, summarising BAN's press release and paper. The full link sits in the attribution below.

This story was reported by The Verge. Read the full original coverage at The Verge.