Achieving Net-Zero? No – But We Can Minimize the Damage

Datacenters are complex, industrial infrastructures with substantial environmental footprints. And as digital demand continues to explode, so too will their energy consumption. The challenge ahead is not to eliminate this footprint; the focus must be on minimizing the damage: improving efficiency and reducing emissions wherever possible.

An article ahead of our participation at Data Centre Expo in London this February.

Digital infrastructure is the nervous system of the modern economy. From banking and healthcare to AI and streaming, the cloud underpins nearly every aspect of our lives. But behind this abstraction lies a physical reality: racks of servers consuming electricity, cooled by energy-hungry systems, powered by grids that – even in 2026 – are still largely fossil-fueled on a global scale.

And global data traffic continues to grow exponentially. This acceleration is not random. It’s the direct result of three converging forces:

• Global digitalization continues to push data processing deeper into daily life – from industrial automation to e-commerce, banking, entertainment, and public services.

• The end of Moore’s Law means compute efficiency is no longer doubling every 18-24 months, so more hardware is needed to deliver the same performance gains.

• The rise of AI, particularly large-scale model training and inference, introduced entirely new workloads with massive energy footprints.

Even under optimistic scenarios, digital infrastructure will remain one of the fastest-growing sectors in terms of energy consumption. And because electricity always comes with a carbon cost – even in low-carbon grids – datacenters will continue to be significant contributors to global emissions unless efficiency is radically improved.

Join SDEA in London

SDEA is partnering with TechEx Events for the upcoming Data Centre Expo in London. Find us on stage at the panel discussion:

"Achieving Net-Zero: Optimising

Energy Efficiency for Green Data Centres"

February 4, 2026 | 14:40-15:10

Most datacenter efficiency metrics focus on the building: cooling, power distribution, electrical losses. These were easier to track but increasingly misrepresent reality. The best example is Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). PUE has dominated for two decades. It compares total facility power to IT equipment power, with lower PUE suggesting less waste on overhead.

However, PUE has major blind spots. It reveals nothing about what IT systems actually do. Datacenters with idle servers achieve world-class PUE while consuming energy without delivering value. PUE also ignores electricity sources – coal-powered and renewable-powered facilities can have identical PUE despite vastly different climate impacts. Low PUE can mask high inefficiency and emissions.

Our metrics need to expand beyond the building to include how IT systems are used and where energy comes from for an accurate picture of datacenter sustainability.