US data centre efficiency ranked by PUE

11 November 2025

Last month I looked at UK data centre efficiency, through the lens of Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ¹. Here’s the same exercise for US companies:

• 1.08 - Meta 2024 from the environmental data report. Meta used to have a live PUE and Water use dashboard for 2 of its data centres, but these have disappeared. See also.
• 1.09 - Google 2024 global fleet average, trailing 12-month PUE - though Ohio is 1.04. Google’s disclosures are excellent.
• 1.1 - under 1.2 - IREN Q4 2025 reporting: 1.1 air-cooled and under 1.2 liquid-cooled in British Columbia, expecting 1.2 in Texas.
• 1.15 - Amazon Web Services 2024 global average, and best centre is 1.04 in Europe. “In 2024, AWS data centers reported a global PUE of 1.15, and our best performing site was in Europe with a PUE of 1.04. In the Americas, our best performing site had a PUE of 1.05, and in Asia Pacific it was 1.07.” Also here.
• 1.16 - Microsoft 2024 global average, but there are suggestions that Microsoft aren’t disclosing for all of their regions?
• 1.23 - Switch “seasoned sectors [across their regions] 12 month trailing average” but best performing sector has PUE of 1.18
• 1.25 - public cloud industry average - IDC - US only? cited by Amazon here
• higher than 1.15 - Oracle “data centres worldwide have also achieved power usage effectiveness (PUE) as low as 1.15” - other companies have averages ~0.1 PUe higher than their best performing, so I’ve stuck Oracle here. Can’t find a sustainability report that mentions average operational PUE, but in calendar year 2023, Oracle’s “Clean Cloud OCI (Gen 2)” report had 1.24 - 2.26 PUE in US data centres.
• 1.26 - Vantage global average - 2023 ESG report
• 1.3 - Nebius 2024 annual average, from 2024 sustainability report
• 1.3 - Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact 2025 target - “By January 1, 2025, new data centres operating at full capacity in cool climates will meet an annual PUE target of 1.3 and 1.4 for new data centres running at full meeting capacity in warm climates. Existing data centres will achieve these same targets by January 1, 2030”
• 1.39 - Equinix (global average) — “global annualized average PUE of 1.39 in 2024” and 2024 annual report
• 1.4 - QTS Realty - 2025 average, from the 2025 sustainability report.
• 1.41 - Iron Mountain 2024, in the Data Centers Sustainability Performance Overview 2024
• 1.46 - CyrusOne 2024 in the 2025 sustainability report
• 1.54 - DataBank 2024, in the corporate responsibility report
• 1.54 - Uptime Institute’s industry average PUE in 2025 - from their survey 2025. This number hasn’t changed much in the last 3 years. The historic curve: 2.5 in 2007, 1.65 in 2014, 1.55 in 2022, 1.54 in 2025. IEA estimates industry average PUE at 1.41.
• 1.58 - Digital Realty - “PUE rating of 1.58, well below the industry average of 1.8”. Digital Realty doesn’t seem to have published its own PUE numbers, but their 2024 Impact report talks about “Exceeded 5% improvement for North America colocation portfolio and 3% improvement for Europe portfolio”.
• 1.63 - on-premises enterprise average - IDC - US only? cited by Amazon here
• Unknown - CoreSite, CoreWeave, Lambda Labs, Crusoe, TogetherAI, Nscale, Core Scientific, TeraWulf, Cipher, Hut 8, Applied Digital, Riot Platforms, CleanSpark, MARA, Bitfarms - they may have disclosed PUE but I haven’t found it yet.

On the whole, the hyperscaled public clouds (Google, AWS etc) and the traditional data centre co-location companies (Equinix, Vantage, Switch etc) have got pretty good disclosures. But the neoclouds/HPC companies don’t disclose much, though Nebius has good disclosures and IREN has mentioned PUE in a quarterly analyst call.

Next questions: Do data centre companies disclose emissions? Are better data centre efficiency and emissions a competitive edge now, or in future?

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1. Is PUE the only thing that matters for answering questions about data centre efficiency, sustainability or justice? No. These PUE numbers are self-reported by companies. The list will definitely be incomplete and contain errors: data was collected in mid November 2025. Claude and ChatGPT helped find some of the urls for this post, but I checked their homework, and the errors will be mine.↩︎