The cloud is the invisible backbone of modern life, but it has a very tangible impact on our world. This vast global network of data centres has an immense appetite for energy and water that grows every year. With global data centre electricity consumption reaching 460 terawatt-hours in 2022, more than the entire nation of France, and the Gen AI boom promising to accelerate this demand exponentially, sustainability is now of the highest importance. For the tech sector, environmentalism has become a strategic, economic and regulatory imperative. In fact, we have reached a point at which optimising for cost and optimising for carbon are two sides of the same coin. In this week's Top 10, we'll take a look at ten of the cloud companies that are adapting best to this new reality.\n\n10. DigitalOcean\nFounded: 2011\nBased in: New York, New York, USA\nCEO: Paddy Srinivasan\nEmployees: 1,210\nNotable feature: A developer-centric cloud platform renowned for its simplicity, predictable pricing, and focus on start-ups and SMBs\nDigitalOcean's has earned its green credentials through its foundational efficiency. By catering to developers, start-ups, and small businesses, its platform inherently encourages right-sized infrastructure, rather than overprovisioning companies like many of its competitors. This focus on simplicity and lean operations makes DigitalOcean inherently low-carbon. While it lacks the headline-grabbing renewable energy projects of the hyperscalers, its business model fosters a culture of resourcefulness, making it a sustainable choice for the new generation of tech companies building from the ground up.\n\n9. Akamai\nFounded: 1998\nBased in: Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA\nCEO: Dr F. Thomson Leighton\nEmployees: 10,700\nNotable feature: The world's largest and most distributed edge platform, bringing content and applications closer to users\nAkamai sustainable superpower is the work it does on the network edge. As a global content delivery network (CDN) with over 4,300 points of presence, its core business is to reduce latency by caching data closer to its end users. This inherently reduces the energy consumed by data travelling long distances across the internet. Backing this up, Akamai is committed to recycling 100% of its e-waste and is actively working with industry groups to standardise emissions reporting, demonstrating a mature, holistic approach to greening the internet's infrastructure.\n\n8. Salesforce\nFounded: 1999\nBased in: San Francisco, California, USA\nCEO: Marc Benioff\nEmployees: 76,453\nNotable feature: A pioneer of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model and a global leader in Customer Relationship Management (CRM)\nAs a SaaS pioneer, Salesforce demonstrates leadership by embedding sustainability into its corporate DNA. While it runs its services on hyperscaler clouds, it takes full responsibility for its environmental impact, maintaining net zero residual emissions across its entire value chain and powering its global operations with 100% renewable energy. Salesforce’s true influence lies in its advocacy and its role as a force multiplier, though. As one of the world's largest tech companies, it can set a powerful example for its vast ecosystem of customers and proving that a commitment to a nature-positive future is a competitive advantage.\n\n7. Alibaba Cloud\nFounded: 2009\nBased in: Hangzhou, China\nCEO: Eddie Wu (Alibaba Group)\nEmployees: 124,320\nNotable feature: The leading cloud infrastructure provider in the Asia-Pacific region, driving digital transformation and sustainability\nAlibaba Cloud is proving to be a force for good when it comes to the sustainability of Asia's booming digital economy. The firm has taken many steps towards greening its own infrastructure, achieving an impressive average Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.20 and sourcing 56% of its electricity from clean energy. More importantly, though, is the fact that Alibaba's cloud technology actively enables its customers to go green, helping them cut 9.884 million tons of emissions in fiscal year 2024 alone.\n\n6. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)\nFounded: 2015\nBased in: Spring, Texas, USA\nCEO: Antonio Neri\nEmployees: 61,000\nNotable feature: A leader in edge-to-cloud solutions with a strong focus on the circular economy and IT asset lifecycle management.\nHPE is a champion for sustainability across the entire IT lifecycle, from edge to cloud. Its strategy is built on a deep commitment to the circular economy, focusing on asset reuse and responsible supply chains. HPE's products themselves are becoming more and more sustainable, too. Its fanless direct liquid cooling and its HPE GreenLake platform, which can lower infrastructure energy consumption by 53%, are some key examples. By reducing its own overall carbon footprint by 13% year-over-year in 2024, HPE demonstrates a holistic and effective approach to sustainable IT.\n\n5. Oracle\nFounded: 1977\nBased in: Austin, Texas, USA\nCEO: Safra Catz\nEmployees: 159,000\nNotable feature: Deep integration of sustainability metrics into enterprise software suites (ERP, SCM) and a robust hardware circular economy\nSustainability is embedded deep within Oracle's operations and products, which combine a highly efficient cloud infrastructure with a world-class circular economy for hardware. An impressive 99.8% of all the firm's processed hardware is now either recycled or reused, and its European and Latin American data centres run on 100% renewable energy. Oracle’s key differentiator, though, is its suite of Fusion Cloud applications, which allow customers to capture, manage, and report on their ESG goals directly within their core business systems, making sustainability a data-driven, operational reality.\n\n4. IBM\nFounded: 1911\nBased in: Armonk, New York, USA\nCEO: Arvind Krishna\nEmployees: 282,100\nNotable feature: A research-driven approach using AI, blockchain, and strategic consulting to tackle systemic sustainability challenges\nIBM approaches green computing as a strategic and systemic challenge, leveraging its deep research and consulting expertise. While operating its own sustainable cloud, IBM's primary impact comes from empowering global enterprises with advanced tools. It deploys AI-powered solutions to manage environmental risks and compliance, and uses blockchain to build transparent, efficient and sustainable supply chains. With nine out of ten executives believing in AI's potential for sustainability, IBM is a crucial partner in turning that ambition into tangible action.\n\n3. AWS\nFounded: 2006 (Cloud computing services)\nBased in: Seattle, Washington, USA\nCEO: Matt Garman\nEmployees: 1,556,000\nNotable feature: The world's largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy, leveraging unparalleled market scale for sustainability\nAWS's command of the market contributes hugely to its carbon footprint, but, in other ways, it helps to drive sustainability at an immense scale. As the world's largest corporate buyer of renewable energy, AWS achieved its goal of matching its electricity consumption with 100% renewables in 2024, a year ahead of schedule. This commitment is matched by relentless innovation in efficiency, from its custom-designed Graviton processors that drastically cut energy use, to its impressive global Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.15. By also committing to be Water Positive by 2030, AWS demonstrates a powerful, scale-driven approach to greening the cloud.\n\n2. Microsoft Azure\nFounded: 2008 (as Project Red Dog)\nBased in: Redmond, Washington, USA\nCEO: Satya Nadella (Microsoft)\nEmployees: 1,500 (dedicated Azure personnel)\nNotable feature: The industry's most ambitious sustainability commitments: to be carbon negative, water positive, and zero waste by 2030\nMicrosoft Azure sets itself apart with the most audacious and holistic sustainability goals in the industry. Its three key sustainability pledges (to be carbon negative, water positive and zero waste by 2030) go far beyond neutrality, aiming to actively replenish resources and remove all its historical carbon emissions by 2050. This ambition is backed by a US$1bn Climate Innovation Fund and radical research like Project Natick's underwater data centres. While transparent about challenges, such as rising Scope 3 emissions from construction, Microsoft's comprehensive vision and powerful customer-facing tools, like the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, make it a leader when it comes to sustainability.\n\n1. Google Cloud\nFounded: 2008 (with App Engine)\nBased in: Mountain View, California, USA\nCEO: Thomas Kurian\nEmployees: 54,000\nNotable feature: A pioneering, engineering-led approach to sustainability, headlined by its goal to operate on 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy by 2030\nGoogle Cloud earns the top spot through its pioneering and deeply technical approach to sustainability. Long before its rivals, it achieved 100% annual renewable energy matching in 2017. Now, it leads with its moonshot goal of running on 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy by 2030, which is a far greater challenge than annual matching because it requires clean energy to be available on the grid every hour of every day. This engineering-first ethos is evident everywhere: from using AI to slash data centre cooling energy by 40%, to building hyper-efficient custom hardware. By aiming to solve the root cause of emissions, not just offset them, Google is actively greening the grid itself.

Top 10: Green Cloud Computing Companies

The article highlights ten leading cloud computing companies that are prioritizing sustainability in response to the growing energy demands of data centers, particularly driven by the rise of generative AI. Each company is evaluated on its environmental initiatives, including renewable energy usage, energy efficiency, circular economy practices, and ESG integration. Companies like Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and AWS are noted for their ambitious sustainability goals, such as achieving 100% renewable energy, carbon negativity, and water positivity. The piece emphasizes that sustainability is now a strategic, economic, and regulatory imperative in the tech sector, with many firms embedding environmental responsibility into their core operations and business models.