Why we run on EU servers powered by renewable energy — and what 'green hosting' actually means

The data centres that power apps like Forkin are one of the fastest-growing sources of electricity demand in the world. The IEA estimates global data-centre electricity use could double between 2022 and 2026 — driven primarily by AI inference and storage. That makes the question of where your app's servers are plugged in a real environmental question, not a marketing one.

Forkin runs on 100% renewable-energy infrastructure across every layer of the stack. This page explains what that actually means — and what it doesn't — because "green hosting" is one of the most over-claimed labels on the internet.

Three things "green hosting" usually means

When a cloud provider says it's "green," it almost always means one of three things, in increasing order of meaningful:

1. Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs / Guarantees of Origin) — the provider buys certificates equal to its electricity use. The certificates may be unbundled from the actual electrons consumed, and may be sourced from another country entirely. Better than nothing, but easy to abuse.
2. Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) — the provider signs long-term contracts with specific renewable generators, contractually matching their consumption to dedicated new capacity. This is the AWS / Google / Microsoft model.
3. Direct renewable supply + transparent reporting — the provider runs in regions powered by genuinely low-carbon grids (Nordic hydro, French nuclear, German wind), publishes hourly grid carbon intensity, and reports residual emissions honestly.

The third category is rare. The first is everywhere.

What Forkin actually runs on

• Hetzner (Germany) — operates on 100% certified renewable energy with verified PPAs for hydro, wind, and solar. German grid carbon intensity itself is dropping as the country phases out coal.
• Hyperstack (UK/EU) — GPU compute provisioned in EU regions with documented renewable supply.
• Scaleway (France) — French data centres on the French grid (one of the lowest-carbon grids in the world thanks to nuclear), and the company's "Environmental Leadership" commitments include adiabatic cooling and waste-heat recovery.
• Bunny.net (Slovenia) — EU-only edge routing for our zone, modest residual emissions reported.
• Brevo (France) — French infrastructure on the French nuclear grid.

None of these involves shipping data across an ocean to a US hyperscaler whose median grid mix still includes natural gas peakers. Geography matters because grid mix matters: a kilowatt-hour in Texas is roughly four to ten times more carbon-intensive than a kilowatt-hour in Norway or France.

The expensive part: AI inference

Embedding models, vision-language models, and meal-scan 3D pipelines are dramatically more energy-intensive than serving a web page. A single GPU running large-model inference at full utilisation can pull 350–700 watts continuously. Multiplied across many users, this is where the real footprint lives — not in your Next.js server.

So we made two specific choices:

1. On-demand GPU lifecycle. The nightly batch that enriches our product catalogue spins up a GPU only when it's needed (02:00 UTC), runs, and destroys it. The GPU is not idling 23 hours a day burning electricity for nothing.
2. Inference-grade quantization. Our VLM serves on a Qwen 35B-A3B MoE model at AWQ 4-bit. That's roughly 4× less VRAM and ~3× less energy per request than the FP16 equivalent, with no observable quality loss on the structured tasks we run.

The green-infrastructure ledger

You can audit this yourself. Forkin publishes a live green-infrastructure ledger showing kWh consumed, CO₂e avoided versus a global-average baseline, and which providers we use. It updates hourly from the actual server bills, not from a marketing claim. If we ever lose a green provider or move to a dirtier grid, you'll see it in the numbers.

What we're not claiming

We're not carbon-neutral. We don't buy offsets and we don't intend to — the science on most offset projects is shaky, and the honest path is to minimise emissions at the source rather than to launder them.

We're not zero-impact. Every web request consumes electricity. The honest claim is: the electricity we consume comes from low-carbon sources, hosted in EU jurisdictions, on transparent and auditable infrastructure. Beyond that, the most environmental thing we can do is help users avoid the highest-impact products — which is precisely what our environmental score on every product is designed to do.

Why pay more for this?

EU green-hosted infrastructure is more expensive than US hyperscalers. Renewable PPAs cost more than dirty baseload. Smaller EU providers don't have hyperscaler economies of scale. Those costs land in our gross margin — they don't get passed on as a "green tier."

If you subscribe at the Supporter or Champion mission tier, a measurable share of your subscription funds wildlife and reforestation partners through our quarterly donation programme. That's where the marginal climate impact compounds: well beyond the few grams of CO₂e your scans personally cost.

Our mission · Environmental score methodology · Live green ledger