When Digital Realty’s vice-president of sustainability, Aaron Binkley, started out, sustainability and carbon emissions reduction wasn’t a big focus. Whether in the real-estate and architecture sector where he began, or in datacentres, the focus was typically more about maximising investments.
Today, he finds great satisfaction in leading Digital Realty’s sustainability collaborations and striving for higher standards globally, finding common ground in stakeholders’ differing perspectives to devise a true value proposition and communicate possible solutions.
“I practised architecture,” says Binkley, “I got licensed. I worked as an architect. And then after grad school, I stopped practising, and did sustainability programme work for a global company with a global portfolio.”
Brought up on a small family farm in Pennsylvania next to an Amish community, he studied architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, and afterwards attended graduate school at its Centre for Building and Performance Diagnostics.
While his family were neither eco-warrior nor Amish, he grew up understanding the need to steward the natural environment. However, 20 or so years ago, when Binkley started working in sustainability, environmentally focused collaborations and initiatives for better-designed buildings were scarcer than today.
Clients often loved the idea of going green, but were less keen on the certification part. “I’d say, ‘well, you’re sort of missing the forest for the trees a little bit if you do that’,” he reveals. “That was one animating question for me, for grad school. Why aren’t more real-estate owners adopting this strategy that makes sense to me as an architect?”
There, Binkley researched, wrote and published a thesis on carbon – on how to monetise carbon credits for further investment in real-estate energy-efficiency projects. And that delivered Binkley’s first sustainability job.
Kicking off a sustainability programme at globally focused warehousing company AMB Property, he built it up over several years, including through a merger. By then, times were changing – and something else was happening as well, namely big tech.
“I was in the Bay Area, headquartered in San Francisco, and I wasn’t doing anything technology-related,” says Binkley. “I was near Google and Meta, all these amazing companies, and it felt like a missed opportunity.”
Bridging the gap to tech
He surmised that datacentres might help him bridge the gap between tech and property, while remaining in sustainability. So, in 2014, he interviewed for the role of sustainability director at Digital Realty, which was seeking someone to take the helm of the global datacentre giant’s sustainability programme.
The operator already had “the bones of good practice”, says Binkley, having done some greener buildings and work on energy efficiency. And tech as a whole was increasingly feeling pressure to become greener and more energy efficient.
Indeed, Binkley cites Greenpeace’s Clicking Clean initiative in 2013 and 2014 as a driver.
“It was basically a muckraking initiative around ‘how green is the internet’ – your new iPhone, all the web searching that was all powered by coal and gas and polluting utility power sources – and asking what the likes of Microsoft, Amazon and Google were doing about that,” he says.
“And in their first report, they listed all the tech companies, including datacentre providers and Digital Realty. Most of them got a D or an F. It was a real warning for the tech industry.”
Binkley says Digital Realty vowed to do better. That meant they needed to figure out how to make improvements, which very quickly sent them out on the hunt for someone like him to ramp up sustainability company-wide.
“They saw that I understand industrial buildings, I understand office buildings, so I can understand the datacentre,” says Binkley. “It helped me get up to speed quickly, and it helps me have intelligent conversations with the teams in a real estate datacentre-focused company.”
The most rewarding part of the job? “I’m pretty proud of the renewable programme that Digital Realty’s built over the years. I think that’s been a very important part of our continued sustainability journey and success.”
The operator’s 2025 sustainability impact report reveals it achieved 93% renewable electricity, alongside an overall 1.38 PUE and 0.59 water usage effectiveness (WUE), while recycling 45% of its water.
It also cut Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 68% from 2023, against a 42% reduction target. Its Scope 3 reduction target is 25% by 2030, although those emissions increased 28% in 2025; Digital Realty says that’s down to developing more datacentres.
It has assessed sustainability impacts across 59% of its suppliers and met sustainability certification standards for 1.5GW of its datacentre capacity. Revenue growth remains healthy. With more than 300 facilities across 30-odd countries, it reported an 18% quarterly jump in total revenues to $1.9bn (£1.4bn) in its Q2 2026, 29% up from the year-ago quarter.
Sustainability remains challenging
Achieving sustainability is challenging but enjoyable, Binkley concedes.
When he started, the operator did no renewables procurement. He steered them to start securing power purchase agreements with wind and solar farms. Key to that success, of course, was the ubiquitous theme of speaking the right language to the right stakeholders. Without that, it’s tough to garner executive support and involvement. Today, the programme has evolved across energy efficiency, water management and greener buildings.
When sustainability suddenly starts to make sense from the perspective of a whole team or even just an individual, the satisfaction can be enormous, says Binkley.
For example, in a previous role, he discovered lighting accounted for the lion’s share of energy consumption. The company didn’t understand this at first.
“The buildings mostly didn’t need air-conditioning,” says Binkley. “And while they had very small electrical loads, they had banks of lights in the ceiling, previously HID [high-intensity discharge] and metal halide.”
The solution was to replace them with more energy-efficient, controllable LEDs, which he saw as a no-brainer to do company-wide to save money and increase sustainability.
They would say they understood, but kept raising objections – what about the costs, the schedules, the contractors? “There were all these ‘buts’, right? Like they weren’t convinced,” says Binkley. “And we were talking about lighting.”
Then, one manager in one market revealed that a long-term customer had moved out. They’d been in one building 20 years; it wasn’t in good condition. They’d lost their security deposit – and Digital Realty needed to renovate anyway before re-leasing.
It dawned that he could put the security deposit money into lighting. It would look nicer; a bright space instead of a dark cave. And he could tell the real-estate brokers the space was recently refurbished, including new high-efficiency lighting to keep costs low. It was like a switch went off in his head, says Binkley. “From that point on, every time we got space back from an old customer, it was standard practice,” he adds.
Other retrofits of energy-efficient lighting followed, cross-pollinating across Digital Realty’s various markets over time. Site staff became “less begrudging” of the change, and customers liked the better visibility as well.
“It was all in the service of how to empower people to figure out how something works for them, and finding ways to get the business excited about it,” he says. “That’s truly gratifying.”
Of course, there are less positive aspects too. Binkley is often dismayed by the extent of negative public discourse about datacentres, which has been “something of a gut punch”, he reveals.
“It is disheartening and even painful to experience when you and your peers are trying your hardest and to do the right thing around energy efficiency, emissions reduction and other environmental and sustainability issues,” says Binkley.
“We’re seeing a lot of this right now,” he says. “The story out there is not consistently accurate. I know that datacentres don’t all use that much water, for example.
“I’m a ‘by the facts’ kind of person by nature,” says Binkley. “I want to be well researched, accurate and technically correct, with the numbers at my fingertips, for good or for bad. But there are many misconceptions about datacentre impacts, what the industry is doing, and how much we care.”
Legacy of history
Some discourse may be the wages of history, says Binkley, of a general legacy of environmental destruction. Significant industrialisation over the past hundred years or so – from steel to automobiles, petrochemicals, aviation, to name a few sectors – rarely considered environmental impacts.
Expansion was prioritised. Major, heavy polluters didn’t clean up “after their messes”, leaving an environmental bill that in many cases has not even today been calculated, let alone paid for or redressed. “We now need to clean up all these sites that were contaminated, and decarbonise these industries after the fact,” he says.
All that said, from the early days, the datacentre industry was one that was sourcing renewable energy and trying to be efficient. Binkley notes that even from 2013 or 2014, many datacentre companies were committing to cleaner energy and decarbonisation. This often went beyond what other sectors were doing.
“What other industry has grown from its earliest stages with clear, definable, accountable environmental commitments?” he asks. “I don’t think that even 20 years ago another high-growth industry would have built that in. So, it feels like a gut punch when people say you’re the worst industry out there now, when we’ve been a major buyer of clean energy in the world for many years.”
