india's IT boom has a great future with it. once in a land where genuine opportunities were missing, the IT revolution is bringing huge opportunites.

but i have not seen one IT company (whether it is big companies such as Satyam, Infosys, Cognizant, TCS, etc or biggies such as google india, yahoo india, etc or small startup's which are thriving in india by hundreds perhaps thousands) talk about green buildings, sustainable power usage, electricity saving measures.

these huge companies server thousands of american clients and hence has huge data centers for their server hardware. this will cost huge amounts of power since the data has to be maintained 24*7.

mercury news profiled an article regarding energy usage by american data centers, the one's that are run by google, yahoo, etc. from the report:
The scope of energy consumption by data centers is a little difficult to measure, but it is undeniably surging. An average data center of 50,000 square feet uses enough power to operate 2,500 homes. Large server farms built by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft in Washington and Oregon consume huge amounts of hydroelectric power.

in northern california alone, the local utility provider pg&e reports as follows:
Bay Area utility Pacific Gas & Electric estimates that data centers in Northern and Central California use 400 to 500 megawatts, or enough energy to power at least 300,000 homes.

costwise google engineer luiz andre barraso warns correctly as,
A Google engineer, Luiz Andre Barroso, warned about a year ago that if the energy performance of servers and other equipment does not improve, the cost of running them could far exceed the price of the hardware.

but american companies are starting to address this issue. sun, intel, AMD, etc are working on to bring up low power generating chips and servers.

will our IT giants listen. will they care a small bit in environment of india by going for energy efficient servers.

because even if its development of India due to IT boom, by going green, can mean sustainable development.