PUE vs. WUE: Balancing Efficiency and Sustainability in Modern Data Centers
For more than a decade, PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) has been the cornerstone metric for managing energy efficiency in data centers. However, with cooling technologies evolving rapidly, rack densities climbing—especially in AI and HPC environments with high heat-flux servers—and operators bearing greater responsibility for sustainable resource management, WUE (Water Usage Effectiveness) is quickly emerging as an equally critical benchmark. [...]