Every time we book a hotel online, stream a movie or make a video call, data centres worldwide consume a lot of energy and water. A label launched in Switzerland wants to reduce the environmental and climate impact of our digital habits and position the Alpine state as a location for greener data centres. In January 2017, Puerto Rican singer Luis Fonsi released a single that would go down in history. In the first six months, the Despacito video clip was viewed 4.6 billion times on YouTube. Today it’s been seen more than eight billion times, but there’s an even more astonishing figure. According to estimates, the streaming of Despacito consumed more electricity than the power used by 10'000 households in Switzerland in one year. Data centres consumed the most power. They are the buildings containing the servers and physical infrastructure to manage email traffic, store our photos in the cloud – or in this case, run platforms such as YouTube. "Data centres have become the pillars of ...
