Data centres account for between 1.5% and 2% of global electricity consumption
Eh, nothingburger. As the original source of this data notes in their report, global IT systems energy demand has only slightly expanded in the past decade, because the countervailing trend is that workloads are migrating from tragic-comic corporate datacenters with PUE of 2 or worse, into the cloud where the PUE is 1.1 or so. And in the cloud the power that is delivered to the CPU is better used due to oversubscription, multitenancy, and so forth. Finally, because large-scale operators often also build their own renewable energy facilities, their fraction of global CO2 is much less than their fraction of energy consumed.<p>Naturally you should design your systems for maximum efficiency, but since operating expenses are closely approximated by power consumption you are already correctly incentivized to do so.