Green Computing Infrastructure and the Environmental Governance of Nearby Firms: Evidence from China’s National Green Data Centre Pilot

Data centres are among the fastest-growing sources of electricity demand, and the policies that govern them are evaluated almost entirely by what happens inside the facility. This study asks whether such a policy also reaches the firms around it. Using 30,547 firm-year observations for 3918 Chinese A-share listed companies in 249 cities between 2010 and 2024, we treat successive designations under China’s National Green Data Center Pilot as a staggered, city-level shock and estimate its effect on how firms govern environmental responsibility. Governance is measured as the balance of favourable and adverse environmental events recorded for a firm by regulators, certifiers and complainants, rather than by what the firm says about itself. Designation shifts that balance towards the favourable side by roughly an eighth of a standard deviation. Decomposing the record locates the movement: firms become markedly more likely to hold a favourable environmental record and markedly less likely to hold none at all, while adverse records, which are rare, move little. The finding survives cohort-robust estimators, randomisation inference, province-by-year fixed effects, three alternative designation dates, and a rank-based recoding that removes the index’s ceiling. The governance return is larger where the local knowledge base is deeper and smaller where same-industry firms are densely clustered, indicating that local absorptive capacity, not the infrastructure alone, governs the return. Estimates are positive across eastern and non-eastern, coastal and inland, state-owned and private, and manufacturing and non-manufacturing firms. Green digital infrastructure therefore delivers sustainability value well beyond its own energy footprint.