Eco study: Data centers guarantee sustainable digitization in Europe

While the demand for computing power has increased tenfold over the past ten years due to the ongoing digitization of the economy and society, the energy requirement per gigabit in data centers is twelve times lower today than it was in 2010. At the same time, CO2 emissions from data centers are falling across Europe. CO2 emissions are expected to drop by 30 percent by 2030. These are the findings of the preliminary excerpt of a study by Eco-Verband for the Alliance for Strengthening Digital Infrastructures in Germany.

"Digitization in business, administration and society is advancing, and with it the demands on computing power in data centers. This development is causing a moderate increase in energy consumption. However, this does not mean that the CO2 emissions of data centers in Europe have shot up accordingly.

says Klaus Landefeld, Deputy Chairman of the Eco Board. Further efficiency potentials also arise from the growing importance of cloud computing. Advantages such as flexibility, scalability, low administration effort or no investment costs mean that more and more organizations are opting to use cloud technologies and can thus reduce their electricity requirements by up to 84 percent. However, as the study shows, Europe lags behind other parts of the world in the use of cloud services in enterprises. On average, only 26 percent of EU companies used paid cloud services in 2018.