What is the carbon footprint of your company’s servers? What is the carbon footprint of your company’s servers? And how easy is it, really, to find out? Few companies have clear data on the environmental impact of their IT infrastructure, yet more and more organizations are asking these questions as cloud sustainability becomes a strategic priority.
Calculating the exact carbon footprint can be complex, but at a high level there are a few key aspects to consider when estimating the impact of servers: where the servers are hosted (on-premises or in the cloud) and what type of energy is used—green energy (from renewable sources) or energy generated by burning fossil fuels.
What do server-generated emissions look like, in broad terms?
When it comes to carbon emissions, the website Goclimate.com provides some indicative values, based on a standard 1U dual-socket rack server with two Intel Xeon Scalable processors and 1 TB of DDR4 memory. To simplify the assessment, we use these reference values:
- Cloud server using 100% green energy: 160 kg CO2e / year / server
- Cloud server using non-green energy: 621 kg CO2e / year / server
- On-premises or data center server using 100% green energy: 320 kg CO2e / year / server
- On-premises or data center server using non-green energy: 1,243 kg CO2e / year / server
The differences are clear. A cloud IT infrastructure operated by a provider powered 100% by renewable energy is the most environmentally friendly option.
This context is even more relevant given that, in 2023, the digital sector generated around 3.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to approximately 3,500 kilometers driven annually by car for each user, according to GreenIT. In this landscape, cloud migration and the optimization of digital services become key strategies for reducing the environmental impact of digitalization.
Why does on-premises infrastructure lag behind in terms of sustainability?
There are several clear reasons why on-premises IT typically has a higher carbon footprint and is not the most sustainable choice:
- High level of equipment underutilization.
In many organizations, servers run at only 20–30% of capacity, having been sized for rare peak loads. For example, a server purchased to handle a few days of peak traffic per year will consume energy 24/7, even if it is used at only a fraction of its potential the rest of the time. - Longer usage cycles.
Equipment is often kept for 5–7 years or more, resulting in lower performance and poorer energy efficiency compared to newer hardware generations. - Lower degree of virtualization.
Without advanced consolidation and virtualization, each application ends up running on dedicated infrastructure, increasing total energy consumption. - Limited focus on renewable energy.
In many regions, electricity still comes largely from fossil fuels, amplifying greenhouse gas emissions. - Operational costs and complexity.
Cooling, redundancy, and maintenance of local infrastructure add extra energy consumption, often managed inefficiently.
The result is clear: most on-premises servers operate below capacity, generating unnecessary energy consumption and higher emissions than required.
Cloud migration – the engine of digital sustainability
On the other hand, cloud migration has major potential to reduce emissions. A study by Accenture shows that migrating to the cloud can reduce global emissions by nearly 60 million tons of CO2 per year.
More recent McKinsey research indicates that cloud technologies can accelerate almost half of the global decarbonization initiatives needed to limit global warming to 1.5°C by 2050. Moreover, cloud solutions can directly contribute to reducing global emissions by up to 32 GtCO2, nearly half of what is required to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.
According to ISG analyses from 2022, depending on the provider, cloud servers can have 2–4 times lower carbon emissions for the same workload compared to on-premises data centers, thanks to higher efficiency, better resource utilization, and the use of renewable energy in hyperscale facilities.
These figures may seem abstract, but a concrete example is telling: a Spanish journalist calculated the impact of storing 20,000 emails for two years. The result? 510 kilograms of CO2 generated for an apparently trivial action. The difference between storing these emails on on-premises servers versus in the cloud would have been enormous.
Want to achieve cloud sustenability? Choose M247 Global cloud services
If your goal is to have a lower carbon footprint starting in 2026 and to achieve your cloud sustainability objectives, M247 Global is the right choice.
First, M247 Global relies on highly virtualized infrastructures that ensure optimal utilization of IT equipment. In practice, high-performance servers are efficiently used to run customers’ cloud virtual machines, reducing resource waste and unnecessary energy consumption.
Second, between January and December 2025, the M247 Global Data Center was powered exclusively by green energy from renewable sources—wind, solar, hydro, or combinations of the three. This was confirmed monthly by the energy supplier and certified by ANRE through withdrawn Guarantees of Origin, in accordance with Romanian legislation. In fact, 100% green energy has been the de facto standard for M247, with the company operating entirely on renewable energy in 2024 as well.
Ongoing investments by M247 Global have kept the infrastructure at international standards, combining colocation, dedicated infrastructure, private cloud, and shared cloud. The result is a strong balance between performance, operational efficiency, and sustainability—an essential argument for organizations looking to reduce their environmental impact without making technological compromises.