In today’s digital age, data centers are the heart of digital technology-led advancements across several industries. This is directly proportional to the apparent demand in the power generation required to keep them running. This paper explores energy-efficient approaches for designing and operating green data centers, contrasting them with traditional ones. Key factors discussed and analyzed in this paper are data center energy demand, data center energy efficiency, power source-based emissions, and energy-efficient cooling solutions. Results from this study show that data centers moving from standard air cooling methods to state-of-the-art air cooling methods can witness up to 78.6% energy efficiency improvement. Likewise, data centers using the immersion cooling method instead of the standard air cooling method can experience up to 96.1% energy efficiency improvement.