Equinix, a data centre real estate investment trust, has pledged to be carbon-neutral by 2030. The Redwood City-based firm runs 230 data centres across 26 countries and five continents. That is a significant amount of processing power, which necessitates a significant amount of energy. However, Equinix is taking steps to achieve sustainability in the sector, especially with green bond financing.
According to the company’s Green Support Framework, the bonds will finance projects for green buildings, renewable energy, energy efficiency, water efficiency, waste reduction, and clean transportation. Equinix has established science-based climate goals that are consistent with the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
Even as the sector’s energy requirements have risen modestly owing to server efficiency improvements, consolidation, design, and operation, even while digitalization has grown rapidly. Global data centre energy use in 2018 was 205 TWh or 1 percent of global power consumption. Modern data centre cooling and power systems are so efficient that the reduction in their energy consumption compensates the increase in overall IT device energy consumption.
Equinix made $68 million in net profit on $1.658 billion in revenue in the second quarter by providing colocation services, renting space in its data centres to multiple tenants to house their servers, storage, and networking equipment, and providing their customers with ways to let their computers communicate privately rather than over the public internet.
