India, March 21 -- The debate around data centres often begins and ends with electricity consumption. That approach misses the real story, as the larger question we should be asking is how much of that electricity actually reaches the computing systems inside.

Data centres themselves rarely "waste" energy in the way people imagine. The real inefficiencies come from the conditions in which they operate, especially in markets like India.

After working around large computing infrastructure for years, a lesson that became clear is that the majority of energy entering a data centre never powers computation directly. It goes into keeping the machines alive.

Globally, the efficiency of a data centre often gets measured using Power Usage Effec...