The Vatican is smaller than a single data center. Now it’s spending $117 million to go carbon-neutral

Pope Francis spent much of his papacy pushing the Catholic Church to treat climate change as a moral issue in addition to a scientific.

Now, the Holy See’s plan is putting money behind that morality and looking to make the Vatican the world’s first carbon-neutral state.

Vatican City, which covers about 44 hectares, or 109 acres, will put roughly 100 million euros ($117 million) toward an agrivoltaic plant expected to power the microstate within two years, sources told Reuters .

The plan builds on what Pope Francis first ordered in 2024.

Pope Leo has spent the past year moving it through the bureaucratic steps needed to build it by creating a foundation, a memorandum with an Italian utility, and a joint commission.

What’s new is that this is the first time a dollar figure has been attached to the plan.

And it also puts into context what we’re doing stateside.

The Vatican is roughly an eighth the size of Central Park.

It’s smaller than a single data center campus like Meta’s Hyperion data center project in Louisiana, which is on track to draw as much as 5 gigawatts of power by 2030.

Home to roughly 800 residents and nearly 3,000 commuting lay workers, it’s the smallest country on Earth by a wide margin.

It’s so small that the plant won’t fit within the country’s 109 acres: It’s being built on the roughly 1,050-to-1,100-acre Santa Maria di Galeria estate the Vatican owns outside Rome, land close in size to the campus for OpenAI’s Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas.

But where Stargate’s footprint is built to support 1.2 gigawatts of AI computing, the Vatican’s similarly sized site is expected to generate just 80 to 90 megawatts of capacity, per Reuters , or roughly a dozen times less power on similar acreage.

But that’s because it’s built to run a few hundred residents’ worth of lights and a radio transmitter, not racks of GPUs.

At risk of power shortages A single large AI data center now consumes as much electricity as a city of 80,000 people , Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla wrote in Fortune this year, and companies are building hundreds of them at once.