Efficiency Was Always the Plan
Cloudflare didn’t start out with an environmental mission. The original goal was purely technical: make the network as fast as possible. But speed has a physical constraint — the speed of light — and the only way to beat that constraint was to put servers closer to users. That meant partnering with ISPs and installing gear directly inside their networks, which meant building hardware that drew as little power as possible.
The result is that environmental friendliness became a side effect of the chase for performance. An obsession with processing more requests per watt didn’t just make the network faster; it made it greener. A 2015 study by Anders S. G. Andrae and Tomas Edler estimated the average energy cost of processing a byte of data online. Based on that data, Cloudflare’s processing is more than 19 times more efficient than the industry average.
Local Serving, Smaller Footprint
Keeping traffic close to users has environmental benefits beyond raw server efficiency. When requests don’t have to be backhauled across the globe to a handful of massive data centers, the network itself does less work. In 2020, Cloudflare estimates that customers reduced their carbon output by 550,000 metric tons by using the service — roughly the equivalent of eliminating 635 million miles driven by passenger cars.
That figure matters more as Cloudflare’s reach grows. With more than one in six websites now using the service, changes to the platform can have an outsized effect on the Internet’s overall footprint. The company is using that position to push four new initiatives.
Four Commitments Announced
The first is a pledge to be carbon neutral by 2022. Cloudflare already runs a large portion of its network on renewable energy, but the new commitment covers 100% of energy use. That pledge also extends backward: the company says it will purchase offsets to zero out all historical carbon output from powering its network since launch in 2010.
Second, Cloudflare is ramping up deployment of a new class of servers built on Arm technology. These machines can perform the same amount of work while using half the energy of the previous generation. By betting on power-efficient hardware, Cloudflare hopes to push the broader chip market toward more efficient designs.
Third, the company is releasing a new option for Workers and Pages — its computing platform and JAMStack offering — that lets developers route workloads to the most energy-efficient data centers. The “Green Workers” option comes at no additional cost. The tradeoff is added network latency for those workloads, a compromise the company expects many developers to accept.
Attacking Redundant Crawling
The final initiative targets a less visible source of waste: web crawling. Nearly half of all Internet traffic is automated. Most of that is malicious, which Cloudflare blocks outright, but legitimate crawlers — from search engines and similar services — account for more than 5% of all traffic.
According to Cloudflare’s analysis, more than half of that legitimate crawl traffic is redundant, repeatedly reindexing pages that haven’t changed. Working with several leading search and crawl companies, Cloudflare is introducing an open standard to minimize excessive crawling. Eliminating redundant crawls, the company calculates, would have the same environmental impact as planting 30 million acres of forest.
The original motivation was speed, not sustainability. But the technical decisions made in the pursuit of performance turned out to have clear environmental benefits. The mission now is to make those benefits intentional rather than accidental.
