Plateau That Never Comes: When Efficiency Claims in Datacenters and AI Become Greenwashing

Abstract: Datacenter expansion under generative AI is increasingly framed as compatible with sustainability because of efficiency gains, cleaner electricity procurement, and improved facility design. Yet these claims often do not show that absolute electricity, water, material, waste, and community-facing burdens are falling. This Perspective addresses that evidentiary gap. Rather than asking whether efficiency gains are real, we ask when such gains are being enlarged into claims of system-wide sustainability to justify continued expansion. We develop a rebound-informed diagnostic framework for evaluating AI and datacenter sustainability narratives across five tests: metric, boundary, reinvestment, burden shifting, and governance. Applied to major AI industry sustainability reporting, the framework shows that firms largely justify continued expansion through efficiency improvements and clean-energy procurement, rather than by demonstrating reductions in absolute resource use. Applied to plateau claims in the literature, we show that many claims establish local or relative improvements while leaving energy rebound, lifecycle burdens, and enforceable limits unresolved. We argue that these sustainable-growth narratives begin to function as greenwashing when they use efficiency improvements to claim sustainability even as absolute energy, water, material, and public health burdens continue to increase. We conclude by positioning digital sufficiency as a burden-of-proof framework for governance: those advocating further datacenter expansion must show that it reduces, rather than merely redistributes or defers, absolute burdens across the full system.