Acxiom Works to Reduce Its Carbon Footprint

Companies

• Acxiom

Acxiom, which operates several data centers in the US, is undertaking targeted projects to improve the efficiency of its data centers and reduce its overall environmental impact. The company is making significant progress in three key areas: consolidating data centers, shifting to virtualized environments and converting to air cooling.

Between 2019 and 2021, Acxiom sunset three of its eight owned data centers, significantly reducing energy consumption across the company's footprint. The company also closed one of its leased facilities in the Chicago area.

In addition, Acxiom's cloud-first approach means a move to dynamic virtualized environments, which in turn enables consolidation to a smaller number of servers. This means there are fewer devices in the data centers that require power and cooling. Over the last three years, the Acxiom Private Cloud has enabled considerable migration to dynamic virtual environments, with an almost 4 times increase in virtual instances in 2021 alone.

Finally, to minimize the use of water in its data centers, Acxiom has converted from water-cooled computer room air conditioner units to air-cooled units. Following 30 conversions, Acxiom now has air-cooled units throughout all of its owned data centers. This has made a huge impact on lowering water consumption and significantly reduced waste.

As a result of these initiatives, Acxiom's annual electrical consumption dropped by approximately 35% over the last four years, using 30,000 kilowatts less each year than it did in 2018. This equates to the power consumption of almost 25,000 average U.S. households.

Similarly, in the last four years, Acxiom's total water consumption has been reduced by more than 93% as a result of the conversion of water-cooled computer room air conditioner units to air-cooled units. For additional context, the volume of water that Acxiom is saving would be enough to fill over 21,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.

Acxiom continues to minimize the footprint of its data centers and is planning to exit another facility in 2023. In addition to making data centers more sustainable, the company is addressing its wider carbon footprint across the organization by reducing waste and optimizing power usage across all of its facilities.