TENCENT Holdings Ltd. is the best of China’s energy-guzzling cloud services providers when it comes to tackling carbon emissions and procuring from renewable sources, Greenpeace said in a research report.

Internet firms now rank among the biggest corporate consumers of electricity and in China rely largely on carbon-intensive coal-fired power to keep their data centers humming around the clock.

The environmental group has predicted that energy consumption by China’s data center industry will rise by two-thirds between 2019 and 2023, at which point the sector’s total power use will equal the whole of Australia’s.

Tencent had a positive record on transparency and had increased renewable energy procurement, Greenpeace said, without giving details.

The Shenzhen-based gaming and social media giant also said in January it would work towards carbon neutrality, although it did not give a target date.

Huawei Technologies ranked second and Baidu Inc. third. Alibaba fell from first place last year to fourth with Greenpeace saying it had performed poorly in disclosing energy data and switching to renewable energy sources.

Alibaba said in a statement that it was committed to developing green data centers. “It is our ongoing mission to embed eco-friendliness to our technologies,” it said.

The report analyzed the performance of China’s 22 largest cloud and data center companies in areas such as renewable energy, energy efficiency and data transparency.

Thirteen of those companies have begun to actively procure renewable energy, up from eight in 2019, but only Baidu and Chindata Group have renewable energy usage rates higher than 3 percent, it said.

Greenpeace urged Internet and data center firms to aim for 100 percent renewable energy use and to become carbon neutral by the end of the decade.

Chindata Group is the only major Chinese firm to promise to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030, it said.(SD-Agencies)