How we’re making Cloudflare’s infrastructure more sustainable

Whether you are building a global network or buying groceries, some rules of sustainable living remain the same: be thoughtful about what you get, make the most out of what you have, and try to upcycle your waste rather than throwing it away. These rules are central to Cloudflare — we take helping build a better Internet seriously, and we define this as not just having the most secure, reliable, and performant network — but also the most sustainable one.

With incredible growth of the Internet, and the increased usage of Cloudflare’s network, even linear improvements to sustainability in our hardware today will result in exponential gains in the future. We want to use this post to outline how we think about the sustainability impact of the hardware in our network, and what we’re doing to continually mitigate that impact.

Sustainability in the realm of servers

The total carbon footprint of a server is approximately 6 tons of Carbon Dioxide equivalent (CO2eq) when used in the US. There are four parts to the carbon footprint of any computing device:

1. The embodied emissions: source materials and production
2. Packing and shipping
3. Use of the product
4. End of life.

The emissions from the Continue reading