GreenOps: From cloud spend to carbon spend, should sustainability drive SaaS decisions?

Modern SaaS is compute-heavy

Traditionally, SaaS benefited from a very low marginal cost. Once the product was built, serving another customer was cheap. However, that assumption no longer holds, as data pipelines, background jobs, analytics, video processing, AI and global infrastructure all consume real energy and make modern SaaS compute-heavy.

GreenOps is often framed as an ethical or regulatory issue, but in practice founders need to start to see it as an operational one and one that works hand in hand with financial decisions. The same decisions that reduce waste, idle capacity and inefficient architecture can also help to reduce emissions, exposure to regulation and long-term operating risk. Sustainability, therefore, is no longer something you add to a SaaS business after it scales, it is something that needs to be designed into the way the product runs.

At saas.group, where we acquire and scale dozens of founder-led SaaS businesses and at World Fund, where we back companies with significant decarbonisation potential, we see the same pattern again and again: in the race to move fast, teams optimise for convenience over efficiency. Servers are spun up “just in case” and data is endlessly duplicated and workloads run around the clock, whether they create value or not.

What looks like speed in the moment quietly compounds into structural waste – eroding margins and locking in unnecessary emissions.

Marry up infrastructure & climate decisions

The most effective and impactful SaaS companies should be looking at where infrastructure decisions and climate decisions can be married up. Storage strategy, caching, batching jobs, model size and data retention are no longer just technical debates. They directly influence both financial and sustainability outcomes. For example, an oversized AI model doing unnecessary inference creates both financial drag and environmental cost.

Schumacher: Success will not be defined by who ships fastest or scales largest. It will be shaped by those who move from thinking only in terms of cloud spend to considering carbon spend, embedding sustainability into every operational and architectural decision.

The tools to track kilograms of CO₂ per workload with precision are becoming increasingly sophisticated and accessible. Cloud providers now offer energy usage signals and dashboards, third-party monitoring platforms can estimate carbon intensity across services and APIs exist to map workloads to regional grid cleanliness. AI and data-intensive processes can be analysed for their environmental footprint and idle resources can be flagged automatically.

The goal is not perfect accounting, but comparability and awareness – when teams see carbon alongside cost, trade-offs become clearer and architecture reviews shift from focusing solely on performance and reliability to considering environmental impact as well.

Across the saas.group portfolio, a clear pattern emerges: as companies gain visibility into their resource consumption, behaviour tends to change almost naturally. Teams begin to identify and reduce waste, streamline and simplify complex data pipelines, right-size infrastructure and question legacy decisions that no longer serve the business. In doing so, margins improve while emissions fall simultaneously and sustainability shifts from being an aspirational goal to an operational reality embedded in day-to-day decision-making.

AI accelerates this shift even further, because AI-native SaaS does not merely store and serve data – it is constantly computing. Tasks such as inference, embeddings, classification and background processing introduce variable operating costs that grow with usage, meaning that more customers no longer just translate into more revenue; they also require more GPUs, more power and generate more emissions. Many teams are surprised when they look closely at where their AI energy is actually going, as it is rarely the obvious places.

It is background processes, retries, oversized models used for small tasks and data that no one questions anymore. This is where FinOps and GreenOps converge most clearly, because designing efficient models, implementing smart batching and caching and right-sizing infrastructure are as much climate strategies as they are cost strategies.

There is also a broader business dimension. ESG has rightly gained attention, but compliance alone is not enough. A company can score well on ESG frameworks and still operate a business model that is fundamentally wasteful. For me, sustainability is not just about reporting, it is about whether the product and its operations genuinely align with responsible growth.

When acquiring a SaaS company, I’m looking for a balanced approach to business that prioritises both growth and impact. Clean energy investment is not accelerating because it feels good, but because it makes economic sense. Today, 55% of low-carbon technologies are already cost competitive in most situations, or will be soon and another 10% are only marginally more expensive. From 2016 to 2024, companies pursuing green growth achieved higher revenue valuations, according to Boston Consulting Group analysis. So sustainability is no longer a trade-off, it is increasingly a competitive advantage.

A fundamental rethink of the hardware stack

At World Fund, we similarly look for technologies where climate impact and economic value are mutually reinforcing. In this space, that means looking beyond the code to the physical components of the digital age. While software optimisation is essential, given the massive energy requirements, we believe a fundamental rethink of the hardware stack is necessary.

This includes investing in next-generation electronics, advanced cooling systems and novel computing architectures designed to handle AI workloads with a fraction of the traditional power draw. By attacking inefficiency at the silicon and thermal layers, we are investing to decouple AI’s growth from rising energy consumption and emissions.

At saas.group, sustainability is no longer a “nice to have” when we look at acquisitions and scaling strategies. Efficient infrastructure, disciplined cloud usage and thoughtful architecture tell us something about management quality. They show whether teams understand leverage, long-term cost and responsible growth. This can be done with internal tools, or using special GreenOps tools like Sopht.com or North.cloud. Companies that treat GreenOps as part of core operations, alongside security, maintainability, performance and scale, are simply better prepared for the future. Sustainable SaaS is not slower SaaS. It is usually smarter SaaS.

Success in the future will not be defined solely by who ships fastest or scales largest. It will be shaped by those who move from thinking only in terms of cloud spend to considering carbon spend, embedding sustainability into every operational and architectural decision. Companies that balance performance, scale and efficiency with environmental responsibility will gain a lasting advantage, proving that profitability and impact can grow hand in hand.

World Fund is a Europe-focused climate venture capital fund established by Daria Saharova, Danijel Višević, Craig Douglas, and Tim Schumacher. From energy, food, agriculture and land use, to building materials, manufacturing and transport, World Fund says it is investing in European tech with significant climate performance potential (CPP).