Interview: CyrusOne on the Sustainable Innovation that Drives Datacentre Business Outcomes

Why It Matters

Embedding sustainability into core operations turns ESG into a financial lever, attracting capital and differentiating data‑centre providers in a carbon‑constrained market.

Key Takeaways

• Sustainability now a profit centre at CyrusOne.
• Centralized ESG team aligns engineering, finance, HR.
• 2024 emissions fell 29% despite 70% growth.
• $11bn of debt tied to sustainability targets.
• Goal: climate neutrality by 2030 with renewable power.

Pulse Analysis

The data‑centre sector has long been one of the most energy‑intensive segments of the digital economy, prompting operators to seek ways to decouple growth from carbon output. CyrusOne’s approach—embedding a dedicated ESG function that reports directly to senior leadership—illustrates a broader industry shift where sustainability is no longer a peripheral compliance task but a strategic asset. By standardising green‑building certifications such as BREEAM, LEED and TRUE across its global footprint, the company creates a uniform baseline for energy efficiency, which in turn reduces operational expenditures and enhances client confidence.

Financial markets are rewarding this paradigm. CyrusOne’s recent $14 bn debt issuance, with $11 bn linked to ESG performance, demonstrates how sustainability‑linked financing can unlock cheap capital for expansion while imposing measurable environmental targets. The firm’s ability to cut carbon emissions by 29% in a year of 70% business growth not only exceeds its Science‑Based Targets initiative (SBTi) commitments but also signals to investors that growth can be achieved without proportional emissions. This performance is likely to inspire peers to adopt similar financing structures, accelerating sector‑wide adoption of renewable power contracts and efficiency upgrades.

Looking ahead, CyrusOne’s roadmap to climate neutrality by 2030 hinges on scaling renewable electricity procurement, exploring low‑carbon backup solutions like hydro‑treated vegetable oil, and maintaining transparent ESG reporting—including rare water‑use disclosures. While policy uncertainty in the United States adds risk, the consolidation of compute workloads among a few large providers creates economies of scale that can support ambitious decarbonisation goals. As customers increasingly demand low‑carbon data‑centre services, operators that embed sustainability into their profit model will capture market share and set new standards for responsible digital infrastructure.

Interview: CyrusOne on the sustainable innovation that drives datacentre business outcomes

By Computer Weekly · 2024

Speaking to Computer Weekly from colocation giant CyrusOne’s head office in Dallas, Texas, the company’s vice‑president of environmental, health, safety and sustainability (EHS), Kyle Myers, says that while strategies that reduce energy use shrink your bills, there is more to it than that.

Sustainability initiatives and the sort of strategic liaison work that comes with wearing that particular hat are also very often highly trusted initiatives, where partners are keen to work together. So, sustainability conversations can and do deliver “the best intel” in ways that ultimately drive innovation through sharing and transparency, Myers says.

“[EHS] is actually a profit centre in the company,” he says. “I know people tend to think it isn’t. Compared to some other hats that I’ve worn, sustainability is usually not a cost centre.”

Myers agrees that data is the new oil, as we’ve so often heard, responding: “Yes, it’s all that good stuff. People love to share best practices. Speaking with customers is where I hear what’s innovative, what they’re working on and which competitors they’d point to.”

And, typically, there is openness. Many see the potential for the greater good, for both sustainability and company valuations.

Digging into past job history

Myers does not specifically come from a datacentre or IT background. Before moving to the cloud, as it were, he spent a decade in the manufacturing and chemicals industry.

His bachelor’s in environmental public health and safety netted an early role at a chemicals‑treatment, storage and disposal facility dealing with waste cyanide, chlorine and the like. After an MBA, Myers held stints at large companies such as Dean Foods, Dr Pepper Snapple Group and Home Depot, as well as the University of Florida.

“My last company was going into bankruptcy, so it made sense to jump. And I just happened to get a call saying, ‘We’re looking for somebody in a datacentre’,” he says. “I said I don’t really know what that means, and ‘You’ve got the wrong person’.”

But the more Myers heard, the more his interest was piqued. A lot of datacentres relied on fairly new disciplines, including environmental or sustainability aspects.

“Most safety people would say, and I think this is also true for environmental, that manufacturing and industrial is gold‑standard experience,” he adds. “You’re dealing with hazardous waste, dangerous chemicals and large pieces of equipment. You can’t afford to make mistakes – it does have a little splash of excitement to it as well.”

With health and safety and environmental matters spanning his whole career, moving to a focus on greenhouse gases (GHGs) and climate change was almost a natural progression. When Myers was at school, it was problems such as acid rain that caused more worry across the sector.

“I’m not saying companies didn’t have programmes or didn’t think about sustainability, and that it wasn’t central to most companies. That is not true, at least not in the worlds I’ve worked in,” he says.

Working with some of the largest customers in the world, and perhaps being based on the US West Coast, means companies often take sustainability very seriously. Such organisations have “very aggressive goals”, Myers explains.

A world of possibilities – in silos

Once convinced and sitting at CyrusOne, Myers saw the firm needed to pay more attention to sustainability, thinking through its position to understand what it did and did not want to do. A world of possibilities existed, often in silos, and needed figuring out, he says.

“Our company, like many others, did sustainability stuff, but they didn’t really think of it under that topic. About six years ago, we first pointed out the need to have a central focus on just sustainability,” Myers says.

It needed to understand engineering, operations, construction, finance and think everything they did through. Myers’ team then started a sustainability working group, a cross‑functional team that meets every month. It includes multiple business functions, such as marketing, human resources (HR), engineering, operations, construction and more.

Since then, working at CyrusOne has been “like riding a rocket ship”, Myers says. This is not just because of growth – the company now has 55 datacentres across North America, Asia‑Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, up from 30 datacentres and 300 employees when Myers joined “a little over eight years ago” – but because of the importance of innovation.

“The toughest thing for our ongoing operations – with facilities built that have stuff in them and are operating, from a cost and business interaction perspective – is surprises,” he adds.

Planning in advance, as teams typically prefer, is a challenge. You need to think about the next new construction and green‑building goals well ahead of time. At CyrusOne, the sustainability team needs to “kick the tyres” on perhaps 15 different standards, ascertaining two or three that might be the best fit.

Then the team reality‑checks, works with design and construction, does pricing, and discovers how to solve the array of challenges in a timely manner before committing to a sub‑optimal option and signing a contract that could delay deliveries for months.

Myers feels he has been able to expedite that process by centralising the sustainability function, including related storytelling.

The idea is to stay synchronised worldwide, to speak to updates or challenges – or anything that falls in the environmental, sustainability and governance (ESG) domain – that folks should be aware of. That helps ensure everyone on different projects is moving together practically and pragmatically in an organised direction.

“It wasn’t always that way. Also, it is hard to be successful without having that sort of relationship. From the very beginning, it became clear that, even just to have transparency, that’s always been the cornerstone of what we tried to do.”

“I’m proud of the volume we’re doing [the sustainability initiatives] at. Doing things portfolio‑wide, it takes a really, really long time.” – Kyle Myers, CyrusOne

When it comes to functions not directly “environmental”, such as HR, Myers notes that he isn’t responsible for that. However, he does report on things they might do or that affect the sustainability domain, and may challenge the department to consider reporting on elements that have an effect or discuss setting a related goal.

“It’s by necessity. I don’t know how you could function and get anything done without some form (of structure) like that,” he says.

All of that is part of what is so satisfying about his job, although of the multiple individual initiatives, the real accomplishments are years in the making.

Over six years, it’s been about incorporating sustainability in all aspects of the business. That includes initiatives such as the 18 green‑building and waste certifications, also financed “so we pay for ourselves”, as CyrusOne highlighted in its 2025 sustainability report.

Programmes include a Gold from environmental ratings firm EcoVadis, Green Globes building certification, Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) sustainable‑building certification, a Total Resource Use and Efficiency (TRUE) Gold rating, and the ReWorksSA recycling programme from San Antonio, Texas.

Last year, CyrusOne also committed to achieve BREEAM or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification at all new standard‑build datacentres.

“Also in 2024, we secured $14 bn (£10.6 bn) of debt financing for datacentre growth, of which $11 bn are sustainability‑linked. To get those things, we started four or five years ago,” Myers says. “First, we ask if we want to do something, and then, what are the drivers and theory of value?”

Their analysis also entails trying to measure and work out what costs come along with all that. Is the cost worth calculating? What value might that add or subtract? Only then is it typically time to begin moving forward.

“I’m proud of the volume we’re doing [the sustainability initiatives] at. Doing things portfolio‑wide, it takes a really, really long time,” says Myers.

Strong, sustained strategy gets results

Overall, the strategy is getting results at decoupling business growth from carbon growth. The datacentre operator calculated that versus a business expansion of 70 %, its carbon emissions have decreased 29 % during calendar year 2024 – more than meeting its Science‑Based Targets initiative (SBTi) target by 16 percentage points.

“We also disclose water usage, which is rare in the datacentre sector. These steps reflect our belief that credible, empirical reporting is essential for trust and progress,” says Myers.

Getting this far, unsurprisingly, has taken years of work – incorporating energy‑efficiency projects, carbon‑free electricity contracts, and work with customers that have procured their own low‑emissions electricity contracts for CyrusOne datacentres. The overall goal is climate neutrality by 2030, as defined using SBTi metrics, Myers confirms.

“Since 95 % of our Scope 1 and 2 footprint comes from electricity, our focus is on accelerating renewable procurement and efficiency,” he adds.

For diesel backup generators, CyrusOne is exploring alternatives such as hydro‑treated vegetable oil (HVO) and even projects that eliminate backup power entirely, driven by evolving customer requirements. These innovations will move the company toward climate neutrality without relying heavily on offsets.

And for the future? Banks are sticking with their commitments, but issues have arisen.

While the 1.5 °C target looks to be moving further away, CyrusOne will continue to build resilience against climate impacts and aggressively reduce its carbon footprint aligned with science‑based targets and planning for different “climate futures”, he says.

“It shouldn’t be controversial to say that current US policy direction is something we need to be aware of. However, the good news is that so much compute power is being consolidated on a handful of companies. They have held their position; they maintain or increase what they’re asking, whether that’s building something or operating something for them,” says Myers.