What Effects are Carbon Pressures Having on Data Centres?

As sustainability pressures reshape infrastructure strategies, technology executives must now weigh carbon emissions alongside traditional cost and performance metrics.

The environmental impact of data centres is becoming increasingly significant despite being ‘out of sight out of mind’, as Mat Brown, Technical Lead, Data Centre & Sustainability at Nutanix explains.

“We often imagine digital infrastructure as clean, weightless and invisible,” he says. “Yet, somewhere between the moment a customer taps an app and a transaction completes, electricity is consumed and carbon is released. 

“Multiply that by millions of workloads running continuously worldwide, and the impact becomes impossible to ignore.”

Estimating this impact goes beyond simple power consumption metrics.

According to Goldman Sachs Research, energy use from data centres may increase by 160% by 2030, highlighting the need for efficient infrastructure choices, especially for companies with public commitments to sustainability.

However, many corporations initially focus on supply chains and travel policies, overlooking the data centre as a key area for reducing emissions, a perspective that is gradually changing.

“But the data centre has remained a blind spot,” he says. “That's starting to change.”

Assessing the physical footprint of the digital world

Mat outlines a future in which data centres will increasingly incorporate carbon considerations into their strategy.

Carbon costs are no longer hypothetical but are becoming a tangible concern for businesses with sustainability goals.

“Modern applications and services rely on extensive IT infrastructure and while digital services may not directly produce smoke or exhaust gases, the servers that support them do draw power — lots of it,” Mat says.

“Data centres sit at the heart of today’s digital ecosystems and their energy demand is only expected to grow.”

Corporations are starting to realise that emissions vary based on where and how workloads are managed, Mat says.

“The key insight is that emissions are not fixed. The same workload can produce vastly different emissions depending on where it runs and how that region generates electricity,” he adds.

“From what we’ve observed at Nutanix, even small shifts in where workloads run, particularly to regions using cleaner energy, can lead to real emissions savings, without affecting application design or user experience.”

How Nutanix is tracking emissions

Through its Carbon and Power Estimator, Nutanix aids users in calculating the estimated annual power and carbon emissions for different Nutanix solutions.

Organisations using this application have realised that even slight location changes can lead to notable carbon reductions.

“For example, moving a general virtualisation workload with 200 virtual machines (VMs) from Poland to France could reduce estimated annual emissions from 34 metric tons of CO₂ equivalents (MTCO₂e) to just 2 MTCO₂e,” Mat says.

“This means emissions performance can now sit alongside cost and availability as a practical consideration in IT strategy.”

IT departments can further reduce emissions by selecting colocation or public cloud providers prioritizing cleaner energy sources.

With the rise of renewable energy in national grids, operational emissions from electricity use are expected to continue decreasing, shifting focus to embodied emissions.

“These are the emissions associated with manufacturing, transporting and installing the IT equipment itself and in countries like France, they may already account for more than half of the total lifecycle emissions,” he says.

“Factoring in embodied carbon is becoming essential for organisations looking to account for the full environmental cost of their infrastructure choices.”

Embodied emissions, which consider the lifecycle from manufacturing to installation, are increasingly significant. 

“To address this, many hardware manufacturers are now publishing lifecycle analyses (LCA) or product carbon footprint (PCF) documentation,” he explains. “This helps organisations make more informed decisions about when and how often to refresh infrastructure.

“With the right tools, businesses can make decisions that balance cost and sustainability, without sacrificing control, performance or flexibility."

Understanding the impact of IT infrastructure

Prolonging the lifespan of existing hardware can reduce embodied emissions, but this must be balanced with the efficiency and performance advantages of newer technologies, Mat says.

“At Nutanix, we’re seeing growing interest from customers looking to “sweat” their assets beyond the traditional five-year refresh cycle, in some cases extending to seven years or more,” he says. 

“Sustainability is often a key motivation, alongside cost efficiency. As low-carbon electricity becomes more common across global grids, we expect more IT leaders to take a lifetime impact approach when planning their data centre strategy.”

Visibility is key to understanding the total environmental impact of IT infrastructure. Therefore, modelling tools revealing energy consumption and emissions across IT footprints are invaluable.

“Tools that model energy consumption and emissions across different IT footprints give organisations a much clearer picture of their carbon impact,” he adds. “With this insight, IT leaders can rebalance workloads, align infrastructure choices with ESG goals and demonstrate credible progress to stakeholders.”

This level of visualisation could ultimately shift how the industry approaches climate action and deliver what Mat calls “ a practical lever for change”.

As regulatory pressures increase, particularly when it comes to data centre emissions transparency, this type of tracking could soon become a lifeline for businesses. 

“Every digital decision is now an environmental one. The decisions made in a boardroom about cloud strategy, data residency and infrastructure architecture can carry just as much weight,” Mat explains.

“The path to net zero won’t be paved by pledges alone. It will be built through thousands of small, data-informed decisions. These are not glamorous changes. But they are powerful.

“And in the race to reduce emissions, they might be the ones that matter most.”

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