Sustainable Digital Infrastructure and Firm Productivity: A Quasi-Natural Experiment on China’s Green Data Center Pilot Program

The rapid growth of computing demand poses a material challenge to climate policy, making the productivity effects of green digital infrastructure an urgent empirical question. This study estimates whether China’s National Green Data Center Pilot Program, a policy bundling energy efficiency mandates with renewable energy procurement at the infrastructure layer, generates measurable firm-level effects on digital transformation and total factor productivity (TFP). This study treats the staggered rollout of the program across cities as a quasi-natural experiment and estimates its effect on listed firms using a two-way fixed effects difference-in-differences design over 2016 to 2023, complemented by event study analysis, placebo tests, instrumental variable diagnostics, heterogeneity robust estimators for staggered adoption, and mechanism and moderation analyses. The central finding is that pilot designation significantly accelerates firm-level digital transformation, measured by textual indicators of data value mining capability (p