How we’re making Cloudflare’s infrastructure more sustainable

This post details Cloudflare's approach to reducing the environmental impact of its server hardware. It outlines the four parts of a server's carbon footprint (embodied emissions, packing/shipping, use, and end-of-life), emphasizing that use-phase emissions are the largest contributor. The post highlights strategies for reducing embodied emissions through modular design, reliance on open standards for hardware reuse, and advanced recycling techniques. It introduces Cloudflare's Gen 12 servers, which emphasize modularity and open standards (OCP 2.0/3.0, Datacenter Modular Hardware System, OpenBMC) to maximize component reuse and reduce e-waste. The post also discusses the ongoing effort to deploy more power-efficient hardware architectures and tune them for Cloudflare's workloads, citing Gen 11 servers as an example of improved performance per watt.