As the scale of data infrastructure rapidly grows, the carbon footprint of that infrastructure grows as well. It is already non-trivial. Consequently, the widespread use of excessively wasteful software implementations that require several-fold the hardware infrastructure of a more efficient design are becoming material contributors to total carbon emissions, more so than many things we focus on for the sake of climate change.

Unlike some other methods for reducing carbon emissions, which require subsidies to be competitive, massively reducing server infrastructure footprint often improves the absolute economics through radical reductions in OpEx/CapEx for data intensive businesses.