It is becoming increasingly clear to more people that our data in the ‘cloud’ doesn’t simply float around in the air. Our digital lives are actually housed in colossal data centres that consume vast amounts of energy, resources and water. A representative survey conducted by Beyond Fossil Fuels in 2025 revealed that 64 percent of people across five different countries oppose the construction of new data centres unless they are powered entirely by renewable energy.
However, the enormous energy demand of new data centres is only one part of the problem. A growing number of these centres require water cooling systems for operation, which often drain already drought-afflicted regions. Furthermore, the immense computational hunger of modern AI applications requires vast quantities of hardware. The production of this hardware exacerbates global inequalities and carries a significant carbon footprint.
The British company Techbuyer has made it its mission to refurbish server hardware. This means reconditioning it so that it remains high-performing and reliable enough for continued use in data centres.
A “Garage Company for Good”
Techbuyer was founded in 2005 by Kevin Towers in Harrogate, UK. Christopher Sweetsir, the company’s Business Development Manager, describes the company’s origins: “We have grown from a small garage company selling used servers into a global firm that truly embodies Green IT. This means we buy and sell servers, storage and networking solutions and essentially everything you find in a modern data centre.”
The typical lifecycle of a server is around three to five years. “This naturally depends on how manufacturers structure their ‘CarePacks’, which are the periods for warranty services and support. When this period ends, companies often completely replace their servers or purchase new ‘CarePacks’,” says Christopher Sweetsir.
Such framework contracts are quite common in the corporate world. The advantage is that businesses do not have to buy expensive equipment like an IT infrastructure comprising notebooks, desktop PCs and smartphones outright. Instead, they can spread the costs through monthly contributions while simultaneously receiving consulting and support services. As Philippe Arradon from the green IT cooperative Commown revealed to us in an interview, this leads to a large second-hand market for notebooks, as many devices are exchanged after just a few years. Crucially, these devices are often more modular than consumer products—and the situation is similar for servers.
Hardware Moves Down a Shelf in the Rack
Servers are typically constructed in the form of “racks.” Within these cabinets, the necessary components can work together modularly. One shelf or “drawer” holds the required processors, another contains several hard drives for data storage and the next houses graphics processors for processing AI applications.
Christopher Sweetsir sees this modularity as an excellent opportunity for an efficient circular economy. According to Techbuyer’s experience, this is already being implemented within many companies. “I hardly know of a data centre today that isn’t engaging in some form of ‘Circular Economy’. As soon as hardware leaves the three-to-five-year cycle, it essentially just moves down a step in the rack while newer hardware is acquired.”
For several years now, new hardware has not necessarily led to a significant increase in performance. “In the world of computers and data centres,” says Christopher Sweetsir, “we have Moore’s Law. This states that the number of transistors on processing chips essentially doubles every 24 months. Accordingly, the computing power of servers increased significantly for a long time—however, this has diminished in recent years. Put simply, computing power doesn’t necessarily double every two years anymore.”
This is, of course, an advantage for the longevity of older server hardware. Not only is the performance of older hardware sufficient for many use cases, but using more modern hardware also fails to deliver a significant efficiency gain. Or, as Christopher Sweetsir puts it: “When we go back a server generation in our planning programmes for IT solutions—meaning we plan with older servers—the energy efficiency does not drop significantly. You can achieve approximately the same performance with an older generation without consuming substantially more electricity.”
Refurbishment saved more than 31,000 tonnes of CO2 in 2024
The fact that large companies like Google and Amazon already operate refurbishment within their own data centres is, initially, a positive sign. However, this form of circular economy runs the risk of being a closed loop externally. Smaller companies, for instance, cannot access the older hardware of large corporations if those corporations have their own internal recycling methods.
How can we ensure a green digital future?
Growing e-waste, carbon emissions from AI, data centre water usage—is rampant digitalisation compatible with a healthy planet? Our latest project explores how digital tools and services can be developed with sustainability in mind.
Techbuyer therefore offers refurbished servers independently. This approach has measurable environmental benefits: according to their own sustainability report, the company saved almost 31,360,000 kilograms of CO2 equivalents in 2024. Furthermore, this resulted in over 800 tonnes less e-waste ending up in global landfills in 2025. This open model, combined with hardware that is cheaper than purchasing new, also encourages more people to acquire their own servers. “We offer small tower solutions that are interesting for home use. As a private individual, I don’t have to immediately buy a full rack cabinet to put in my basement. While I am limited in terms of storage sizes, I can certainly access the advantages of server technology,” says Christopher Sweetsir.
These advantages include independent cloud solutions, which can reliably be implemented using Nextcloud. Users and associations can also run their own Mastodon instance to build a decentralised social network or offer videos via PeerTube. Affordable and comparatively old servers are still perfectly adequate for such applications.
Is refurbished hardware sufficient for AI applications?
We wanted to discuss one specific use case with Christopher Sweetsir at the end of our conversation. Current concerns about the massive expansion of IT infrastructure are heavily linked to the immense computational hunger of large language models—in other words, Generative AI.
For LLM-based chatbots like ChatGPT or Google Gemini to generate realistic answers, data centres must provide particularly powerful graphics processors. Although these can handle more tasks simultaneously compared to conventional processors, they also require more energy and produce more heat. Consequently, AI data centres are water-cooled and place a greater strain on the energy grid than existing data centres.
Large “gigafactories”—which are exceptionally powerful data centres used for AI training and operating large language models—are mainly built with new hardware. This is because the companies currently investing heavily in AI infrastructure work closely with hardware manufacturers. Nevertheless, Christopher Sweetsir notes that bottlenecks are becoming increasingly frequent: “Currently, everyone is investing in AI, and consequently, prices are skyrocketing. For this reason, older chips are increasingly being reconditioned to manufacture other components.”
An expansion of global computing power must be accompanied by circular product cycles. Experiences from the Covid-19 pandemic also showed that in the event of severe bottlenecks, large companies will approach refurbishers like Techbuyer. “Back then, even companies like Apple suddenly accessed the secondary market,” reports Sweetsir. “But at the moment, the usual new-goods mechanism still applies.”
As in other industries, such as the building sector, we should stop viewing circularity merely as a backup. Apple’s reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic and Techbuyer’s experiences show that older hardware is sufficient for many new applications—if only we maintain it properly.
