Sustainability — The Carbon Case for Cloud Repatriation

Hosting on EuroVPS produces less CO₂ than the same workload on AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud — and the gap is widening fast.

For two decades, “moving to the cloud” was sold as the green choice. Hyperscale data centres, the story went, were more efficient than your dusty on-premise rack, and the big providers had the scale to invest in renewables that nobody else could match. For a while, that story was even true.

It is no longer true. The boom in AI training and inference workloads has pushed AWS, Microsoft, and Google into a power crisis. Their absolute emissions are rising, fast. They are signing new fossil-fuel power contracts, restarting retired nuclear plants, and leasing gas peaker capacity to keep their data centres running. Meanwhile, the mature European Tier-1 facilities EuroVPS hosts in have been on 100% renewable electricity contracts for years, supplied by wind and solar generators on long-term power purchase agreements.

If your workload is sitting on a hyperscaler today, repatriating it to EuroVPS does not just save you money and give you back operational control. It actively reduces your carbon footprint. This page explains how, and provides the data your sustainability team needs to make the case internally.

The hyperscaler emissions problem

The big three hyperscalers all publish annual sustainability reports. Read them carefully and a consistent picture emerges: their headline net-zero commitments are on track, but their actual emissions are rising sharply, driven almost entirely by AI-related infrastructure buildout.

• Microsoft reported in its 2024 Environmental Sustainability Report that its total Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions are roughly 29% higher than its 2020 baseline, despite committing to be “carbon negative” by 2030. The increase is attributed primarily to the construction and operation of new data centres for AI workloads.
• Google reported in its 2024 Environmental Report that its total greenhouse gas emissions in 2023 were about 48% higher than its 2019 baseline, also citing AI-driven data centre demand as the primary cause. Google has acknowledged that its 2030 net-zero target has become “extremely ambitious” as a result.
• Amazon (AWS) reported emissions broadly flat year-over-year in 2023 but still significantly above its 2019 baseline, and has announced new gas-fired power purchase agreements to support AWS data centre expansion.

These are not figures from environmental NGOs or short-sellers. They come directly from the hyperscalers’ own audited sustainability disclosures. Anyone in your procurement team can pull the source PDFs from microsoft.com, sustainability.google, and aboutamazon.com and verify them in an afternoon.

Why is this happening?

The cause is simple. Generative AI workloads — both training and inference — consume vastly more electricity per unit of useful work than conventional cloud workloads. A single large language model training run can draw tens of megawatts continuously for weeks. Inference at scale requires entire data halls of GPU servers running at near-full power around the clock. The hyperscalers are scrambling to add this capacity faster than the renewable grid can support it.

The result has been a series of public power deals that would have been unthinkable five years ago:

• Microsoft signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with Constellation Energy in 2024 to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania specifically to feed its AI data centres.
• Amazon signed a deal with Talen Energy to take power directly from the Susquehanna nuclear plant — a transaction that has triggered regulatory pushback from US grid operators concerned about reserved-capacity loss for ordinary consumers.
• Google announced a small modular nuclear reactor agreement with Kairos Power in 2024 to supply future data centre capacity from the early 2030s.
• All three hyperscalers have publicly acknowledged that they are leasing or contracting new gas-fired generation to meet near-term AI demand while waiting for renewable and nuclear capacity to come online.

Nuclear is low-carbon. Gas is not. The point is not that hyperscalers are doing anything illegitimate — they are responding rationally to overwhelming demand. The point is that the electricity feeding hyperscaler workloads in 2026 has a measurably higher carbon intensity than it did in 2020, and the trend line is heading the wrong way.

What EuroVPS does differently

EuroVPS does not run AI training workloads. We do not chase the wave of new capacity that is forcing the hyperscalers into fossil-fuel deals. We host conventional production workloads — websites, applications, databases, mail, virtualisation — in stable, mature, Tier III+ European data centres operated by two of the world’s largest publicly listed datacentre REITs:

Iron Mountain Data Centers — Amsterdam (AMS-1)

• 100% renewable electricity across all Iron Mountain global datacentres since 2017
• RE100 member since 2017
• ISO 14001 (Environmental Management) and ISO 50001 (Energy Management) certified
• Signatory of the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact
• Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi)–approved net-zero pathway
• Annual sustainability disclosure to CDP and full ESG reporting

Digital Realty — Athens (ATH3)

• Digital Realty’s entire EMEA portfolio, including Athens, is supplied by 100% renewable electricity, sourced through power purchase agreements and verified renewable supply contracts
• RE100 member
• ISO 14001, ISO 50001, and ISO 14064-1 (greenhouse gas accounting) certified
• Signatory of the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact
• SBTi-approved emissions reduction targets
• Recognised on the CDP Climate A-List for disclosure quality

Both renewable commitments have been in place for years. They are not aspirational 2030 targets — they are present-day operational reality, audited annually, disclosed publicly, and verifiable in the operators’ own sustainability reports.

What we do internally

Renewable electricity at the datacentre boundary is necessary, but not sufficient. EuroVPS operates its fleet to the same standard:

• High-density compute architecture. Dell PowerEdge MX7000 blade enclosures and modern dual-socket platforms — significantly more compute per kilowatt and per rack-unit than equivalent legacy rackmount estates.
• Active fleet consolidation. EuroVPS is currently running a multi-month consolidation programme at the Amsterdam site, reducing the overall server count and KVA draw without reducing customer capacity, by migrating workloads onto modern higher-density hosts.
• Workload virtualisation. Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager (OLVM) provides high consolidation ratios on every physical host.
• Long enterprise hardware lifecycles. Full enterprise-grade equipment, in-house repair, certified spare parts. Every additional year of useful hardware life is one fewer year of embodied carbon that needs to be amortised.
• Centralised SAN storage. HPE Primera Fibre Channel arrays eliminate the need for over-provisioned local disk on every server.
• ISO 14001:2015 certified at the corporate level — alongside ISO 9001, ISO 27001, ISO 22301, and ISO 37001.

The bottom line for repatriation

If you are running production workloads on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud today, the carbon math is no longer in the hyperscaler’s favour. The same workload, hosted on EuroVPS in Amsterdam or Athens, runs on electricity that is verifiably 100% renewable, sourced through long-standing power purchase agreements with European wind and solar generators that are not being scaled back to feed AI demand.

You also get back the things you lost when you moved to the cloud in the first place: predictable fixed pricing, real engineers on the other end of the ticket, no surprise account terminations, no algorithmic rate limits, and full operational control of your infrastructure. The carbon win is the bonus.

For tender writers and procurement teams

If you are responding to a public-sector tender or a private-sector RFP that asks about your hosting partner’s environmental credentials, the block below is accurate, citable, and ready to copy directly into your tender response. Edit names and dates to taste.

EuroVPS operates production infrastructure exclusively from Tier III+ datacentres run by two of the world’s largest publicly listed datacentre operators: Iron Mountain Data Centers (Amsterdam) and Digital Realty (Athens). Both operators are members of RE100 and signatories of the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact, the EU-aligned framework committing the European data centre industry to climate neutrality by 2030. Iron Mountain has procured 100% renewable electricity globally since 2017. Digital Realty’s entire EMEA portfolio (including Athens) is supplied by 100% renewable electricity through verified power purchase agreements. Both operators hold ISO 14001 (Environmental Management) and ISO 50001 (Energy Management) certifications, report under SBTi-approved net-zero pathways, and disclose annually to CDP. EuroVPS itself holds ISO 14001:2015 certification at the corporate level and operates a fleet built around high-density Dell blade architecture, OLVM virtualisation, and long enterprise hardware lifecycles to minimise both operational and embodied carbon per unit of compute delivered.

Sources and citations

• Microsoft Environmental Sustainability Report — microsoft.com/sustainability
• Google Environmental Report — sustainability.google/reports
• Amazon Sustainability Report — sustainability.aboutamazon.com
• Iron Mountain Annual ESG / Sustainability Report — ironmountain.com/about-us/environmental-sustainability
• Digital Realty Sustainability Report and CDP Climate disclosure — digitalrealty.com/about/sustainability
• Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact official member list — climateneutraldatacentre.net
• RE100 member list — there100.org
• Science-Based Targets initiative — sciencebasedtargets.org

Need something more specific?

Site-level PUE numbers, individual facility certifications, a signed letter on EuroVPS letterhead confirming our datacentre partners, or a full sustainability statement formatted for your tender document — open a support ticket and we will get it across to you. We deal with sustainability tender questions regularly and can usually turn around documentation within a working day.