THE DATA CENTRE INTERVIEW
Sustainability performance improves as customers move to the sovereign cloud Data centre efficiency has become a significant factor in procurement decisions, particularly among European public sector and regulated enterprise customers. AWS cites a global power usage effectiveness( PUE) of 1.15 across its data centres, with its best-performing European sites reaching as low as 1.04. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud uses the latest generation of AWS instance types, including Graviton processors, which Colm identifies as central to those efficiency gains.
“ Systems like our Graviton processor have been a huge part of those efficiency gains, which all feed directly into sustainability,” he says. Research by Accenture puts AWS data centres at up to 4.1 times more efficient than on-premises alternatives – a figure that becomes particularly relevant in the European sovereign market, where many prospective customers have historically been constrained to on-premises infrastructure or, in some cases, equipment housed in office data closets.
This is where Colm sees a compounding benefit specific to the sovereign cloud context. Many of the organisations the AWS European Sovereign Cloud is designed to reach have not previously been able to migrate to public cloud at all, having been held back by regulatory
“Our European Sovereign Cloud runs our same full hyperscale services, the same software and the same systems that we run elsewhere”
Colm MacCárthaigh VP & Distinguished Engineer AWS
constraints or a lack of sovereign assurance. Their baseline is often ageing, inefficient, on-premises hardware. The move to the AWS European Sovereign Cloud therefore delivers a sustainability dividend on top of the operational and security improvements it offers.
“ As they’ re now able to adopt the full sovereign cloud, there is a massive sustainability win, because what we’ ve built is so much more efficient than where they’ re coming from,” Colm says.“ Those customers are motivated by our security and availability benefits too, but it’ s a massive win that we’ re all able to get this sustainability benefit as part of that journey.”
30 July 2026