Green IT

Microsoft agreed to buy a massive amount of clean energy to power a data center in Ireland, making it the second biggest corporate power-purchase agreement deal so far this year.

With an urgent call to prepare supply chains for growing climatic impact, supply chain leaders cannot sit on the sidelines.

It’s proving harder to obtain emissions data to measure the carbon footprints of cloud computing platforms. Regulators are increasingly concerned about the vast water and electricity consumed by large operations.

A skills shortage in areas like carbon accounting, green procurement, and supply chain management threatens the kind of progress needed to arrest global warming, says Microsoft president Brad Smith.

Microsoft, Amazon and the other cloud-services companies are increasingly responsible for the computing horsepower behind the oil giants’ efforts to find and extract more oil and natural gas; an awkward look for companies that have pledged to cut...

Some projections indicate the industry will double in size over the next decade, meaning efforts to mitigate its climate footprint need to accelerate. Absent pressure from governments, it will largely depend on the chipmakers themselves.

Here are five facts on why cloud computing is more eco-friendly than conventional data centers — and why the difference will become even more pronounced in the future.