"You never actually 'cool' anything," said Fernando. "You just move heat into the environment to make it someone else's problem, which increasingly creates global warming. Data centers create more carbon than the world's airline industry.

"Even your mobile phone charger keeps drawing power after you phone is charged, which causes heat, so you turn on the air conditioner, which uses more energy."

Fernando said that EMC was the first software company to deliver solid-state disk storage, which draws 98 per cent less power than the traditional spinning hard disks.

He forecast that solid-state disk drivers, which have no moving parts and are 30 times faster, will be the future for storage.

One million dollars saved