07/08/2026 in News, Views from Echelon

As the energy debate around data centres cycles around once again, it has become clear that there is a lack of understanding about consolidated computing. So, Echelon Data Centres is here to help. There is no option to switch off the modern, purpose-built infrastructure that houses the world’s health records, pension details, payment systems and to a lesser degree, cat pictures. The real choice is not between data centres and no data centres. It is between modern, purpose-built infrastructure and the sprawl of ageing server rooms it was built to replace.

Before hyperscale, enterprise computing lived in comms rooms, basement racks and converted offices and a good deal of it still does. These rooms were never designed as critical infrastructure. Many are cooled by oversized air conditioning units running around the clock, powered through equipment that was efficient a decade ago, and staffed, if at all, as an afterthought to somebody’s day job.

The data centre industry measures facility efficiency using power usage effectiveness, or PUE, which is the ratio of total power drawn to power actually reaching the IT equipment. A perfect score is 1.0. The Uptime Institute’s 2025 Global Data Centre Survey put the weighted industry average at 1.54, a figure held back, according to Uptime’s own analysis, by legacy infrastructure and to regional climate barriers to efficient cooling. Small, older server rooms sit at the worst end of that spectrum: analysis by NRDC and others has put typical small server-room PUE at around 2.0, which means as much energy goes on cooling and power losses as on computing itself, while noting that many of these rooms are not separately metered at all, so their true efficiency cannot even be measured. By contrast, Uptime reports that many recent builds consistently achieve a PUE of 1.3 or better, and the largest hyperscale operators report fleet averages between 1.1 and 1.15.

Efficiency is not only about cooling. It is about how hard the machines work. A widely cited assessment by the Natural Resources Defense Council found that average server utilisation sat at just 12 to 18 per cent, with up to 30 per cent of servers effectively “comatose” or no longer needed, but still plugged in and drawing power around the clock. Consolidated, virtualised environments push utilisation dramatically higher, which means less hardware, less embodied carbon and less electricity per unit of useful work.

The clearest evidence for the consolidation dividend is historical. A landmark 2020 study published in Science, led by Dr Eric Masanet, found that global data centre computing output grew by roughly 550 per cent between 2010 and 2018, while energy consumption grew by only around 6 per cent. The authors attributed much of that decoupling to the migration of workloads out of inefficient local server rooms and into large, professionally engineered facilities. Demand has grown sharply since, and nobody in this industry should pretend otherwise, but the underlying principle holds, every workload consolidated is a workload running more efficiently than it did before.

There is a second benefit that gets even less attention. Which is that a hyperscale campus is metered, monitored, reported and regulated. Its energy use is measured to the kilowatt hour and, in Europe, increasingly disclosed under the Energy Efficiency Directive. Ten thousand scattered server rooms are none of those things and many, as noted above, are not even separately metered. Consolidation does not just reduce energy use; it makes energy use visible and what is visible can be improved.
This is the standard Echelon builds to. Our campuses in Ireland and the UK, including the DUB20 campus at Arklow, County Wicklow, are designed from the ground up as responsible, grid-supporting infrastructure: sited with the energy system in mind, engineered for efficient cooling and power distribution, and built with the capability to support the grid rather than simply draw from it. At LIN10 in Treviglio, Lombardy, we are applying the same approach to a brownfield site, regenerating previously developed industrial land rather than consuming greenfield.

Consolidation is not a licence for complacency as digital demand is rising and the sector’s obligation is to meet it as efficiently and transparently as the engineering allows, in partnership with grid operators, regulators and the communities that host it. But the comparison should at least be honest. The question is not whether computing uses energy, it is whether that energy is used well, measured properly and accounted for openly. On all counts, the modern hyperscale campus is the strongest answer the industry has yet built.