By: Nathan Gassmann and Michael Ellis
The growth of AI, and the significant opportunity it represents, is powered by infrastructure like data centers and the sophisticated hardware contained inside. As the digital economy continues to grow, so does the demand for material resources needed to build this hardware.
As a result, extending the lifespan of these materials — by reusing, repairing, or recycling them — has become a strategic imperative. This transition is essential to reduce material demands and associated carbon emissions, plus it helps bolster our operational resilience and reduce costs.
At Google, our circularity journey began a decade ago. Through concerted efforts over time, we’ve built a system to route decommissioned servers through reverse logistics channels where they are disassembled to capture parts for re-inventory, reuse, or resale on the secondary market.
In 2024, we successfully harvested approximately 8.8 million components from decommissioned data center hardware and diverted those for reuse or resale — including over 3 million hard drives that were securely wiped and reused or resold.
Mike swaps out a motherboard at our data center in The Dalles, Oregon
Building on these operational wins, we spent last year refining our internal strategy through the Circular Electronics Design Guide (CDEG) bootcamp facilitated by Accenture. We’ve now developed a unified approach and a shared language to help all teams articulate the business value of a circular economy. This has deepened our collaboration with key functions, empowering teams to move beyond passive support and become active, insight-driven partners in our circularity mission. We’re also enhancing these internal efforts through external partnerships and industry organizations, like the Circular Electronics Partnership (CEP).
This isn’t the end of our journey — in many ways, we feel like we’re just getting started. Read more about our progress, lessons learned, and ways the entire industry can advance circularity in our new report, Bridging the Gap: Operationalizing Circularity in Data Centers.