Data centers already have the same carbon footprint as the airline industry.
Data centers consume roughly 3% of the global electrical supply and account for 2% of total greenhouse gas emissions. Energy consumed by U.S. data centers alone has doubled over the last five years. And with AI workloads, cloud computing, and high-performance computing pushing rack densities higher every year, that trajectory isn’t flattening on its own.
Containment won’t solve everything. But it changes the math faster than anything else. A 1MW data center can see a 288 kW reduction after containment, translating to an annual CO2 reduction of approximately 2,372 tons. Put another way, that’s the equivalent of removing 252 SUVs from the road every year, without adding capital expenditure to do it.
An environmentally friendly data center is a cost-effective data center. ROI on most containment projects lands between six and eighteen months.
What’s Covered Inside
Why Being Green Matters
The numbers behind data center energy consumption and carbon emissions, and why the industry can’t keep running at this pace without meaningful intervention.
Containment’s Environmental Impact
How separating cold supply from hot exhaust air reduces kW consumption, lowers fan speeds, enables free cooling, and shrinks the carbon footprint, with a real facility example showing the CO2 reduction and dollar savings side by side.
Containment’s Role in HPC
Rack densities are climbing fast. Without containment, high-performance computing environments run hot, inefficient, and at constant risk of hot spots. With it, higher densities become viable.
Full vs. Partial Containment
End-of-aisle doors are a start, not a solution. We explain what full containment accomplishes that partial containment leaves on the table, and what to do when ceiling obstructions get in the way.
CFD Modeling as a Green Planning Tool
How Computational Fluid Dynamics predicts the real-world impact of containment before installation, including updated PUE, annual kWh reduction, CO2 offset, and projected ROI.
CURRENT INDUSTRY QUESTIONS
This white paper will answer
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Why is containment the highest-leverage green initiative available to data centers right now? -
How does containment reduce CO2 emissions, and by how much? -
What role does containment play in high-performance computing and high-density rack environments? -
How does CFD modeling predict energy savings and environmental impact before a project begins? -
What’s the real difference between full and partial containment when it comes to green outcomes?