The Climate and Cloudflare

No: all data centers globally accounted for 2-3% of total global power use in recent years, and power consumption isn’t the only contributor to human carbon emissions. Within power use though, some internet industry analysts estimate that total data center energy (in kilowatt-hours, not percentage of global power consumption) may double every four years for the foreseeable future — making internet energy use more than just rearranging deck chairs…

How does internet infrastructure like Cloudflare’s contribute to power consumption? In contrast, when a customer’s origin has to serve a request, there are two additional costs Cloudflare avoids: first, even getting the request to arrive at the origin often requires many hops over the Internet, each requiring CPU cycles and the energy they consume.

Source: blog.cloudflare.com