The Climate and Cloudflare

The text discusses the role of power in modern technology and its impact on the environment. It highlights that traditional ways of generating power are unsustainable, leading to global warming and threatening ecosystems. While data centers account for only 2-3% of total global power use, internet industry analysts predict that their energy consumption may double every four years. Cloudflare's network infrastructure contributes to power consumption by offering both content delivery and compute services. The company reduces its carbon footprint through efficient utilization of resources, such as running a homogeneous network with high CPU utilization and using caching to save energy. Additionally, Cloudflare Workers, a serverless computing platform, offers lightweight code execution with less overhead, improving efficiency. To offset the remaining carbon footprint, the company purchases Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) to match its electricity use worldwide.