The driving force behind the EU colocation market’s climate-neutral push

As such, the initiative’s participants – which include colocation giants Equinix, CyrusOne and Digital Realty – will be set measurable targets for attainment in 2025 and 2030 that commit them to take steps to improve the energy efficiency of their datacentres and cut the amount of water used to run them.

Participants will also be set targets to encourage them to use 100% carbon-free energy sources to power their facilities and re-use any waste heat generated by their operations. They will also be encouraged to prioritise the repair and re-use of the IT hardware inside.

Progress on all these fronts will be monitored twice a year by the EC, but many of the pact’s participants have previously made individual pledges to do more to improve the environmental friendliness of their facilities.

Digital Realty, for example, went public in May 2020 with its plans to embark on a 10-year carbon reduction initiative geared towards ensuring the greenhouse gas emissions of its operations are within the levels needed to keep global warming at bay.

Several months later, fellow colocation provider CyrusOne set out its intention to become a carbon-neutral datacentre operator by 2040 by using renewable energy to power its facilities, while making a commitment to embark on sustainability-focused equipment upgrades within its existing datacentres. It also pledged to ensure any new datacentres it builds will follow energy-efficiency design principles.

Such proclamations will no doubt have been prompted in part by the EC’s efforts to ensure its digital economy grows in a sustainable way. 

At the same time, however, enterprises are becoming ever more mindful of the sustainability of their own supply chains, which include the companies they source their cloud and colocation services from, says Forrester’s Sunil.

In fact, sustainability is increasingly becoming a source of competitive differentiation for colocation providers and cloud companies, which is another reason why so many of the market’s major players have recently announced plans to make their operations leaner and greener. 

Companies operating in almost all verticals – including technology, public sector, healthcare, banking and finance – will have “ambitious” environmental goals that they are working towards, and want to work with IT partners that will help, rather than hinder, their ability to achieve those aims, says Sunil.

“As a result, the number of requests for information [during technology procurement exercises] that seek information on sustainability initiatives has increased markedly over the past years,” he says.

The hyperscale cloud community are big consumers of colocation capacity and are credited with driving much of the demand for datacentre space in many major European markets. Microsoft, Amazon and Google have all made big green commitments of their own in the past 18 months, and they are likely to be looking to work with colocation partners with similar objectives, says DC Byte’s Galvin.

“It probably will go that way as the market matures,” he says. “The hyperscalers make up the majority of demand right now, and if they were to add environmental sustainability within their own scoring criteria when considering which colocation providers to go with, moving in that direction would become [increasingly] customer-led.”

Expanding on this point, Mark Turner, director of cloud business at hosting provider Claranet, says it is not uncommon for enterprise IT buyers to stipulate in their requests for proposals that they are seeking a colocation partner with certain minimum power usage effectiveness (PUE) score.

This metric is used to measure datacentre energy efficiency and is calculated by dividing a datacentre’s total power consumption by the amount of energy consumed by the IT equipment housed within it.