Carbon Tracking Puts Data Centres in Supply Chain Spotlight

With carbon output under scrutiny, data centres are becoming a critical part of supply chain emissions tracking and strategy for energy-conscious organisations.

Data centre operators are now factoring carbon emissions into their infrastructure decisions, placing sustainability alongside long-standing priorities like cost and performance. 

As climate policies and investor expectations evolve, the environmental impact of data processing is no longer something IT teams can afford to ignore.

An input from Nutanix

According to Mat Brown, Technical Lead for Data Centre & Sustainability at Nutanix: “We often imagine digital infrastructure as clean, weightless and invisible,"

"Yet, somewhere between the moment a customer taps an app and a transaction completes, electricity is consumed and carbon is released.

“Multiply that by millions of workloads running continuously worldwide, and the impact becomes impossible to ignore.”

Supply chains have long been a focus of sustainability efforts, with emissions tied to transport, logistics and manufacturing.

But data centres, the physical facilities that support cloud computing, ecommerce and digital communication, are emerging as a major contributor in this wider chain of environmental responsibility.

Energy use and emissions linked to growing digital demand

Data centres account for a rising share of global electricity demand. In the US, 43% of the electricity used by data centres goes into cooling systems, according to the Aspen Global Change Institute.

AI workloads are also expected to cause emissions to triple by 2030, reaching 2.5bn tonnes of CO2 globally, Morgan Stanley reports.

More surprisingly, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple’s actual emissions may be more than six times higher than their official disclosures, according to The Guardian.

Goldman Sachs Research adds that data centre power consumption could rise by 160% by 2030.

That projection brings renewed urgency to the decisions organisations make around digital infrastructure, location and energy sourcing.

Mat observes that many companies start their decarbonisation strategies by looking at buildings, logistics and travel.

“But the data centre has remained a blind spot,” he says.

“That's starting to change.”

The same digital workload can create vastly different emissions depending on the carbon intensity of the local power grid.

“From what we’ve observed at Nutanix, even small shifts in where workloads run, particularly to regions using cleaner energy, can lead to real emissions savings, without affecting application design or user experience.” comments Mat.

Data tools reframe infrastructure as a supply chain issue

Nutanix has developed a tool, the Carbon and Power Estimator, to help IT teams calculate expected annual emissions from different workload deployments.

The tool helps customers understand how their infrastructure choices affect their carbon footprint.

“For example, moving a general virtualisation workload with 200 virtual machines (VMs) from Poland to France could reduce estimated annual emissions from 34 metric tons of CO₂ equivalents (MTCO₂e) to just 2 MTCO₂e,” says Mat.

This change in carbon output does not require a redesign of the workload, only a reassessment of where it runs.

In this way, IT infrastructure becomes a lever for supply chain optimisation, much like logistics or sourcing decisions.

Colocation and public cloud providers with lower Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) scores can help lower emissions, particularly when their data centres draw on renewable sources.

However, as cleaner electricity becomes more widespread, operational emissions from electricity consumption may decline and embodied emissions may take centre stage.

Mat explains that embodied emissions are “the emissions associated with manufacturing, transporting and installing the IT equipment itself and in countries like France, they may already account for more than half of the total lifecycle emissions.”

To respond, more hardware manufacturers are publishing lifecycle analyses (LCA) and product carbon footprint (PCF) documentation.

These provide transparency and give organisations data to guide equipment refresh decisions.

Extending the life of IT hardware can cut embodied emissions, but the trade-off must be weighed against operational efficiency, performance and risk.

“At Nutanix, we’re seeing growing interest from customers looking to ‘sweat’ their assets beyond the traditional five-year refresh cycle, in some cases extending to seven years or more,” says Mat

“Sustainability is often a key motivation, alongside cost efficiency.”

Greater visibility drives more informed carbon strategy

Modelling emissions across different data centre configurations allows businesses to understand their environmental impact with greater precision. Brown argues that this visibility creates an opportunity for supply chain transformation within IT.

“Tools that model energy consumption and emissions across different IT footprints give organisations a much clearer picture of their carbon impact,” he says.

“With this insight, IT leaders can rebalance workloads, align infrastructure choices with ESG goals and demonstrate credible progress to stakeholders.”

Such changes could reshape industry norms as regulations and reporting requirements evolve.

The ability to track and manage emissions at an infrastructure level may become essential.

“Every digital decision is now an environmental one," explains Mat. "The decisions made in a boardroom about cloud strategy, data residency and infrastructure architecture can carry just as much weight.

“The path to net zero won’t be paved by pledges alone. It will be built through thousands of small, data-informed decisions. These are not glamorous changes, but they are powerful. And in the race to reduce emissions, they might be the ones that matter most.”

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