Environmental Leadership

Since 2017, all data centers used by Scaleway rely 100% on renewable energy. And we do our utmost to use as little energy as possible. Our PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) was 1.37 in 2023, well below the industry average (1.55) and with a minimum of 1.16. This minimum is obtained by DC5, one of Europe's most sustainable data centers (more details below). Furthermore, Scaleway uses free cooling - a natural alternative to air conditioning, data centers' biggest energy consumption source - since 2012.

Whereas many cloud providers use millions of cubic meters of water in cooling towers to keep their servers from overheating, Scaleway is firmly opposed to this type of practice. This is one of the reasons our French data centers consumed only 4451m3 of water in 2022, or the equivalent of 37 French households.

With hardware representing three quarters of global digital emissions, Scaleway has a role to play in reducing the impact of its IT equipment. This is why 80% of our servers' components are reused, why we work to prolong their lifespans by up to 10 years (compared with 4-5 for the rest of the sector), and why Transformers and Nursery, our main hardware reconditioning programs, were industrialized in 2023.

As any green IT strategy must apply accross the entire value chain - from datacenters to hardware and to code - Scaleway is proud to be a pioneer in state-of-the-art cloud products like Serverless or Kubernetes. These notably only consume energy when the user needs them (vs. being 'always on'). Furthermore, we're working to provide our clients with precise and real-time measurements of their cloud products' emissions, with a tailor-made environmental calculator.