Sustainable by design: ARM-only, renewably powered

1. Going ARM-only cuts the energy per request

Badger Cloud runs entirely on 64-bit ARM compute (Ampere-class processors). ARM server CPUs are designed around performance-per-watt rather than peak single-core speed, which maps almost perfectly onto web and e-commerce workloads: lots of small, concurrent requests rather than a few heavy ones.

The efficiency gap is well documented by the chip and cloud vendors:

• AWS states its ARM-based Graviton processors use up to 60% less energy for the same performance as comparable x86 EC2 instances.²
• Ampere's published benchmarks show an Altra processor delivering roughly 50% better performance-per-watt than a comparable AMD EPYC on an NGINX web-serving workload, and ~43% better on Memcached.³

For a platform like ours — mostly NGINX, application servers, and caching — that efficiency translates directly into fewer watts per page served, and a smaller cluster doing the same job.

2. Renewable power and efficient data centres

Hardware efficiency only counts if the electricity behind it is clean. Our nodes run in Hetzner's German data-centre region, where Hetzner reports the following:

• 100% renewable electricity — in Germany from hydropower (since 2008), and at its Finnish site from hydropower (since 2018).¹
• An average PUE of 1.13 (ranging roughly 1.10–1.16), meaning very little energy is lost to cooling and overhead.¹
• Air cooling only — no water is consumed to cool the servers.¹
• Hetzner estimates its renewable sourcing avoids around 77,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year compared with the German grid average.¹

Combining efficient ARM hardware with a low-PUE, renewable-powered facility compounds the benefit: less energy drawn per request, and that energy already low-carbon at source.

3. Small on purpose

The greenest watt is the one you never draw. Badger Cloud is deliberately compact — a single control-plane node plus a small pool of worker nodes run the entire platform. GitOps automation lets that small footprint stay productive without extra always-on tooling, and our observability stack keeps utilisation high so we're not paying — in money or energy — for idle capacity.

What we can and can't claim

We believe in being precise about sustainability. The figures above are published by our vendors, not marketing numbers we invented:

• The renewable-energy, PUE, and 77,000-tonne figures are Hetzner's, for its data centres.
• The energy-efficiency percentages are AWS's and Ampere's, for ARM server processors.

We don't currently publish a single audited carbon figure for the Badger Cloud platform itself — doing that credibly requires measured power draw over time. What we can say with confidence is that every architectural choice here — ARM compute, a low-PUE renewable data centre, and a deliberately small cluster — pushes energy use and carbon down rather than up. As we add power telemetry to our monitoring stack, we intend to report measured numbers here too.