Google has 900,000 servers

Google operates 900,000 servers in data centers around the world, consuming 220 megawatts of power according to a report by Stanford University professor Jonathan Koomey.

While Google doesn’t reveal exactly how many servers the internet giant operators, nor the energy footprint of the servers, the firm does claim that it goes to optimise power consumption.

Internet data centers are notoriously power hungry and Koomey estimated that within the US, data centers used between 1.7 and 2.2 per cent of the entire electricity supply.

Koomey said that Google’s power usage was "less than 1 percent of global data center electricity use in 2010" and attributed the low figure to "higher infrastructure efficiency of Google’s facilities compared to in-house data centers."

He also said that Google’s servers use less power per server.