A recent blog post by AWS’ Jeff Barr outlines why using fewer servers and powering them more efficiently is at least as important to reducing the carbon impact of a company’s data center as its power mix.

Carbon emissions are a factor of three things: the number of servers running, the total energy required to power each server and the carbon intensity of energy sources used to power these servers.

Combining fewer servers used with more power efficient servers, customers only need 16% of the power as compared to on-premises infrastructure. This represents an 84% reduction in the amount of power required, and an 88% reduction in carbon emissions for customers when they use AWS vs. the typical on-premises data center.

Learn more about how AWS is working to achieve their goal of 100% renewable energy usage for their global infrastructure.