What Is PUE in a Data Center?

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]Our data centers waste a lot of energy.

[00:00:02]This is where [music] a PUE comes in.

[00:00:05]One of the big questions I've been getting about data centers is [music] how do we measure their efficiency? Now, these facilities do use a lot of power, but they're tracked very closely.

[00:00:15][music] That's where the term PUE comes in, power usage effectiveness. It compares the total building energy to the energy used by computers. [music] You can think about this like miles per gallon on a car. In a high efficiency data [music] center, you may have a PUE close to 1.2, meaning that most of the energy goes directly to computing.

[00:00:37]>> [music] >> So, while data centers do use a lot of energy, they're constantly being optimized to use less. So, that's a PUE, how efficiency [music] is measured.