Saving electricity one data center at a time

Hundreds of millions of users access our services through the web, and this traffic requires lots of computers. We strive to offer great Internet services while taking our energy use very seriously. That's why, nearly a decade ago, we started work to optimize the energy efficiency of our servers and later set out to build the most environmentally sustainable data centers possible. We now believe that Google-designed data centers are the most efficient in the world.

The graph below shows what we've achieved: our data centers use considerably less energy for the servers themselves, and much less energy for cooling, than a typical data center. We achieved this milestone by significantly reducing the amount of energy needed for the data center facility overhead. Specifically, Google-designed data centers use nearly five times less energy than conventional facilities to feed and cool the computers inside. Our engineers worked hard to optimize every element in the data center, from the chip to the cooling tower.

As a result, the energy used per Google search is minimal. In the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than we will use to answer your query. To learn more about our 5-step approach to efficiency, please check out our new website about efficient data centers.

Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations