Sustainable technologies are built through continuous improvement
Sustainable technologies rarely emerge fully formed. More often, progress comes through a succession of improvements that make systems more efficient over time.
The history of innovation shows that efficiency is not achieved overnight. It is built gradually, through better materials, smarter designs and a deeper understanding of how resources are consumed.
Early innovation
The first electric light bulbs transformed daily life, but by modern standards they were remarkably inefficient.
Efficiency gains
Over time, engineers introduced better materials, new lighting technologies and more efficient designs.
Modern performance
Today, an LED bulb can deliver the same level of illumination while using only a fraction of the power.
From lighting to computing: the same evolution is happening in IT
Computing has followed a similar path. Digital technology consumes significant resources, but modern IT is far more efficient than it used to be.
This progress matters because every optimization, from infrastructure design to application performance, contributes to reducing waste and improving the way digital systems operate.
A Decade of Remarkable Efficiency Gains
According to the International Energy Agency, global internet traffic in 2020 was roughly twenty-five times higher than it was in 2010, while the number of internet users worldwide more than doubled.
Over the same period, energy demand from data centres and transmission networks grew far more slowly than internet traffic and digital workloads.
Global internet traffic increased dramatically, creating a digital ecosystem with far more users, applications, connected devices and data flows than a decade earlier.
More digital activity should have meant more resource consumption.
At first glance, that seems logical. More traffic, more applications and more data should have translated into proportionally higher energy demand.
Yet that is not what happened
While demand for digital services continued to increase, engineers, infrastructure teams and technology providers consistently found ways to make computing more efficient.
The result was a digital ecosystem capable of supporting vastly more activity than its predecessors while using resources more effectively.
Data centres became more energy efficient
One of the most visible areas of progress was the data centre itself. Over that period, operators improved the way computing facilities were designed, cooled, and managed.
Advances in server hardware enabled more computing power per watt, while improvements in cooling systems reduced the amount of energy required to keep equipment operating safely.
More efficient hardware
Modern server hardware made it possible to deliver greater computing power while using energy more efficiently.
Smarter cooling
Improved cooling systems helped reduce the energy required to maintain safe and stable operating conditions.
Better facility design
Optimized layouts, airflow and power distribution helped reduce operational overheads inside data centres.
The shift toward cloud and hyperscale infrastructure
The industry also moved toward cloud and hyperscale data centres. These environments are designed to operate at scale, with highly optimized facilities and more efficient infrastructure management.
Optimizations in facility design and operations helped reduce cooling and power-distribution overheads, allowing a greater proportion of electricity to be devoted to computing itself.
Virtualization, cloud computing, and higher server utilization
For many years, organizations purchased physical servers for specific applications, often leaving much of their computing capacity unused.
A server might spend large portions of its life operating far below its maximum capacity while still consuming power and requiring cooling.
Underused physical servers
Dedicated servers often supported single applications, leaving valuable computing capacity idle for long periods.
Virtualized workloads
Virtualization allowed multiple workloads to run on the same physical server, improving utilization and reducing waste.
Cloud-scale resource pooling
Cloud computing accelerated this shift by pooling capacity across large infrastructures and allocating resources where they were needed most.
Doing more with fewer physical machines
As virtualization and cloud computing became more widespread, organizations were able to support more applications and digital services without requiring a proportional increase in hardware.
These changes improved server utilization, reduced unnecessary infrastructure growth, and made better use of existing resources.
- Reduced infrastructure waste
- Improved server utilization
- Better allocation of computing resources
Measuring and eliminating digital waste
Not all efficiency gains came from larger infrastructure improvements. Some came from a better understanding of how digital services consumed resources.
As monitoring and observability practices matured, organizations gained new ways to identify inefficient processes, unnecessary data transfers, poorly optimized applications, and other forms of digital waste.
Inefficient processes
Detect workflows that consume unnecessary resources or create avoidable operational friction.
Unnecessary data transfers
Identify excessive exchanges, repeated calls or avoidable movements of data across systems.
Poorly optimized applications
Reveal applications that consume more resources than needed to deliver the expected experience.
Hidden digital waste
Make invisible inefficiencies measurable so teams can act on them with precision.
From estimation to measurement
Greater visibility made it easier to target improvements. Rather than adding infrastructure to solve every performance issue, teams could often achieve better results by optimizing existing systems, reducing complexity, and eliminating inefficient behaviours.
This shift helped make sustainability a practical engineering concern rather than a purely theoretical objective.
Modern observability and digital experience tools can help identify inefficient processes, quantify resource usage, and track the effects of optimization efforts.
Discover Ekara GreenRenewable energy and cleaner digital infrastructure
Efficiency was not the only area where progress occurred. Many technology providers and data-centre operators also invested in cleaner sources of electricity and more sustainable operating practices.
Renewable energy procurement became an increasingly important part of digital infrastructure strategies, helping to reduce the carbon intensity of the electricity used to power digital services.
Cleaner electricity sources
Technology providers and data-centre operators increasingly integrated renewable energy into their infrastructure strategies.
More sustainable operations
Beyond efficiency, the industry also improved operational practices to reduce the environmental impact of digital services.
Efficiency gains and cleaner energy worked together
These efforts did not eliminate the environmental impact of computing, but they complemented the efficiency gains achieved elsewhere.
Together, more efficient infrastructure and cleaner electricity helped improve the sustainability of digital operations while demand for online services continued to grow.
Today’s chapter in sustainable IT: the AI challenge
The efficiency gains and growing use of renewable energy achieved over the previous decades did not eliminate environmental concerns. Rather, they created a more sustainable foundation for digital growth.
Today, artificial intelligence presents the latest test of that model. As AI workloads expand, data-centre electricity demand is rising rapidly.
The International Energy Agency reported that electricity demand from data centres increased by 17% in 2025 alone, significantly outpacing overall growth in global electricity demand.
The IEA projects that data-centre electricity consumption could double by 2030, with AI-focused facilities likely to see even faster growth in power demand.
AI has not ended the story of sustainable computing
It would be wrong to view the rise of AI as a reversal of the progress already achieved. The same industry that improved data-centre efficiency, increased server utilization, optimized cooling, and developed new ways to identify waste is now applying those lessons to a new generation of systems.
AI itself is increasingly being used to improve infrastructure operations, energy management, and cooling efficiency.