Numbers showing the Relation between IT Inefficiencies and Environmental Footprint

Intel: Inefficiencies account for 50 % of GHG emissions

According to Intel estimates, infrastructure and software inefficiency count for over 50% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the data center.

— Intel

Seagate: 68 % of data is stored and never used

Only 32% of data available to enterprises is put to work. The remaining 68% goes unleveraged.

— Seagate 2024: Rethink Data

Average server utilization is lower than 50%

shehabi.etal.2016.unitedstatesdata

Space Type	2000-2010	2020
Internal	10%	15%
Service Provider	20%	25%
Hyperscale	45%	50%

Actual server utilization levels of the big cloud providers are unknown. The tool Cloud Carbon Footprint uses the average 50 % as a fallback if the cloud provider's API don't provide actual utilization data.

K8s container utilization is often also quite low

Over 65 percent of Kubernetes workloads are utilizing less than half of their requested CPU and memory.