The Hidden Half of Digital Sustainability – Bringing the Infrastructure Beneath the Code into View
Digital sustainability gets the software, the data, and the policy right. But every digital service runs on physical infrastructure – data centers, electricity, cooling, water – whose sustainability is mostly self-reported and design-based. This talk asks the open-source community to extend its transparency principles to the infrastructure layer, and shows what measured, independently audited data center sustainability actually looks like.
Digital sustainability has rightly become a foundation of how the open-source and civic-tech communities think about software, data, and policy. The infrastructure that runs all of it has not had the same scrutiny.
Most sustainability claims about digital services today rest on self-declared efficiency numbers, design-stage estimates, point-in-time snapshots, or carbon certificates. Operational reality, measured over time and independently audited, is rare. The result is a digital economy that talks about sustainability convincingly but largely cannot prove it.
This 20-minute keynote makes the case that infrastructure transparency belongs in the digital sustainability conversation – and shows what it looks like in practice. We walk through the four dimensions that determine the real environmental footprint of any digital service – data center efficiency, IT efficiency, carbon emissions, and water use – what each looks like under operational measurement versus marketing, and how independent verification turns claims into something stakeholders, regulators, and citizens can actually rely on.
The talk draws on the work of the Swiss Datacenter Efficiency Association (SDEA) – a non-profit operating the only data center sustainability certification built on 100% measured, independently audited operational data – but the focus is the principle, not the product: bringing the same openness, verifiability, and public accountability that defines digital sustainability everywhere else to the infrastructure that powers it.
Matthias leads the non-profit SDEA, providing the only independent certification for measured datacenter and IT sustainability. He operates at the intersection of datacenter infrastructure, sustainability strategy, climate action, and organizational leadership – helping industry leaders prove performance through verified measurement. He holds a master’s degree in Leadership and Management and certifications in datacenter design and climate communication, bringing both technical datacenter knowledge and strategic positioning skills to help operators differentiate through verified sustainability credentials.