Production engergy costs

I work at a company which builds electronic devices and I find it plausible that the production of a computer takes way more energy than it's operation.

Just look at a typical motherboard. Every little part is packaged in a lot of plastic which gets thrown away. The soldering process takes quite a lot of energy and many boards need to through it several times.

So what you need to minimize is the amount of new hardware buildt.

BTW, power supplies tend to be more efficient when evenly loaded. If you can guarante a certain amount of load, you can even use some with a far higher efficiency than typical computer PSUs.