CASE STUDY - Mastercard: Decoupling Growth from Carbon
At a Glance:
Mastercard, powers economies across more than 200 countries worldwide
Data centres being the largest source of Scope 1 and 2 emissions
Removing idle or orphaned assets & consolidating workloads resulted in the decommissioning of over 1,200 servers.
Carbon-aware decision-making helped drive an extra 15% of cost savings + estimated US$2 million in savings.
How IT is Driving Digital Sustainability
For global enterprises that rely on vast digital networks and infrastructure, technology is often the engine of growth. But what happens when that engine becomes the largest driver of operational emissions? This is the central challenge of digital sustainability, and companies like Mastercard are proving that by embedding environmental accountability into IT operations, they can successfully decouple business growth from carbon emissions.
Mastercard, which powers economies across more than 200 countries, views technology as the foundation for the product experience it delivers every day. Recognising the inherent environmental impact of this foundation—with data centres being the largest source of Scope 1 and 2 emissions, and technology contributing a third of Scope 3 emissions—Mastercard launched a sweeping initiative to transform its technology organisation. Their ultimate goal is achieving Net Zero emissions by 2040, aligned with the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), covering Scopes 1, 2, and 3.
Here, we explore the primary challenges faced in advancing digital sustainability and the innovative opportunities created by integrating climate action into core IT strategy.
The Challenges: Data, Culture, and the Cloud Footprint
The shift toward a net-zero future requires overcoming several significant hurdles within digital infrastructure:
Scope 3 Complexity and Cloud Adoption: For global companies, Scope 3 emissions (indirect emissions from the value chain) are a major challenge. Mastercard’s future IT strategy includes large investments in the cloud, which directly correlates with a significant environmental challenge: an increase in Scope 3 emissions. Tracking these emissions accurately across multi-cloud environments (like AWS and Azure) and on-prem assets is complex.
The Cultural Shift (Change Management): While access to real data across critical systems was initially challenging, Mastercard found that the "harder challenge was cultural". Overcoming inertia and achieving foundational change required partnering with cross-functional teams to incorporate sustainability performance into annual objectives.
Factoring in Future Tech (AI): Mastercard is taking steps to include sustainability in its AI planning and deployment, leveraging the same principles used for traditional infrastructure, such as right-sizing, right-placing, and accountability. As new AI infrastructure needs are introduced, the team must incorporate sustainability principles, including equipment specification reviews for energy efficiency, and embed energy allocation planning before deployment.
Evolving Regulatory Compliance: The need to ensure compliance with evolving Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) regulations, such as the European Union's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), requires robust, accurate data.
The Opportunities: Innovation, Visibility, and Shared Accountability
Mastercard’s transformation proves that when sustainability is treated "just like security or finance," it becomes a decision-making factor from the outset. This approach unlocks powerful opportunities:
1. Driving Action Through Data and Gamification
Mastercard's first step was to aggregate granular energy and infrastructure data into a standardised platform. This resulted in a patent-pending dashboard that integrates carbon-based KPIs into product profit and loss statements (P&Ls).
Actionable Insights: The dashboard tracks metrics like real-time energy consumption, location-based emissions factors, and carbon intensity at the program, product, and asset levels.
Gamified Engagement: To engage engineers, the team introduced a Sustainability Score (0–100) that aggregates KPIs like energy intensity and hardware efficiency. The scoring, which uses a Red-Amber-Green (RAG) system based on relative performance, encourages continuous improvement rather than static compliance. This gamified approach led to a surge in proactive engagement, as people wanted to understand and improve their footprint.
2. Efficiency and Infrastructure Optimisation
With newfound visibility, Mastercard’s teams could take targeted action:
Asset Decommissioning: In 2024 alone, Mastercard decommissioned over 1,200 servers, removing idle or orphaned assets and consolidating workloads. This was achieved by showing teams the exact costs and emissions attached to assets that were not being used.
Strategic Right-Placing: The company began right-sizing and right-placing workloads. For example, they can now decide against deploying a development environment in a carbon-intensive region if greater energy efficiency is available elsewhere. A real-world decision in progress involves moving non-production workloads to regions with higher availability of renewable energy.
3. Scope 3 Innovation and Green FinOps
Mastercard advanced its cloud emissions tracking by adopting methodologies like the open-source Cloud Carbon Footprint and partnering with strategic partners like Greenpixie.
Accurate Cloud Metrics: Greenpixie provides comprehensive and accurate carbon, energy, and water usage metrics by enriching cloud usage reports line by line. This allows Mastercard to standardise environmental reporting across various business entities.
Carbon-Aware Decision-Making: Greenpixie helps identify rightsizing opportunities and provides location-based optimisation recommendations that account for regional disparities in carbon intensity. By overlaying sustainability in FinOps (GreenOps), Mastercard can make carbon-aware decisions while prioritising cost. This integration is estimated to unlock an extra 15% of cost savings through increased engagement and an estimated $2 million in savings.
Activity-Based Accounting: For colocation sites (classified as Scope 3), Mastercard upgraded its accounting from spend-based to activity-based metrics by collecting actual energy and emissions data directly from providers, allowing them to realise carbon reductions from the use of renewable energy at those sites.
Conclusion: Making Sustainability a Business Prerequisite
Mastercard’s transformation provides key lessons for other organisations: leadership matters (it was made a formal technology imperative), and it’s critical to start with imperfect data because "directionally sound insights were enough to start making changes".
By making technology accountable for its energy footprint—a concept referred to as multiple materiality—sustainability goals align with risk, cost, and security, becoming a "prudent way to run the business". This approach has already yielded tangible results: Mastercard reported a 1% emissions reduction against 13% corporate growth and a 7% reduction against 12% corporate growth in 2023 and 2024, demonstrating that digital sustainability is a powerful engine for both environmental progress and continued economic success.
“ Mastercard’s shift to carbon accountability is like giving every server and line of code a personal emissions tracker. By making environmental impact visible and tying it directly to business performance (the P&L), they turned the abstract goal of Net Zero into a concrete, day-to-day factor influencing every technical and financial decision.”
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