Digital Infrastructure and Carbon Emission Intensity: Evidence from Enterprise Cloud Adoption

Whether cloud adoption improves corporate carbon efficiency remains underexplored, since prior work has concentrated on aggregate environmental outcomes and left the firm-level routes largely unexamined. Drawing on Chinese A-share listed companies from 2013 to 2023, this study applies a staggered difference-in-differences design to estimate the effect of cloud adoption on carbon emission intensity, with the Sun-Abraham and Callaway-Sant'Anna estimators employed to address heterogeneous adoption timing. Results show that cloud adoption significantly reduces carbon emission intensity, a finding that survives parallel trends testing, placebo testing, and propensity score matching. Cloud adoption raises operational efficiency by enabling more precise asset scheduling and resource allocation, and fosters technological innovation by lowering the cost of data-intensive experimentation. The effect is more pronounced in high energy-consuming industries and among large firms, reflecting stronger compliance incentives and deeper technical integration capacity respectively. These findings extend the understanding of cloud computing's environmental effects from infrastructure-level energy savings to firm-wide carbon efficiency, offering practical guidance for enterprises embedding cloud adoption into decarbonization strategies and for policymakers directing green technology support, with potential reference value for other Asia-Pacific economies navigating comparable digital and environmental transitions.