Real Datacenter Emissions Are A Dirty Secret
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
As more businesses shift an ever greater number of workloads to the cloud, hyperscalers aren't doing enough to help CIOs or tech buyers, who are already under legislative pressure, to be more transparent about their own corporation's carbon footprint regarding compute services.
This is according to tech and channel analyst Canalys, which highlights Amazon - or rather its subsidiary Amazon Web Services - as the worst offender, even though Microsoft and Google do not escape criticism.
"We know that emissions have blown through the roof in the last couple of years. Google and Microsoft are two fantastic examples, but they are not the only examples. Their emissions have skyrocketed despite some significant efforts to cut them," said Canalys Principal ESG Analyst Elsa Nightingale, speaking at the company's Channels Forum last year in Berlin.
At issue, is that emissions from datacenters are likely to be much higher than currently estimated, perhaps more than seven times higher, according to Nightingale, who cited a report last year. This is due to the emissions accounting practices used by the hyperscale operators like AWS, Google, and Microsoft, such as the use of renewable energy certificates to offset emissions in their calculations.
Nightingale said that Amazon doesn't provide AWS-specific, location-based data, meaning: "We don't really know how big AWS's footprint truly is, which I think is a bit worrying."
Amazon has chosen not break out data on environmental stats such as greenhouse gas emissions for AWS from the rest of the company in its sustainability reports, making it almost impossible to determine whether these emissions are growing as they have been for its cloud rivals.
[...] Amazon isn't the sole offender: neither Microsoft nor Google breaks out the emissions of their datacenters separately from the main business.
[...] We asked Amazon why it doesn't break out the emissions data for AWS separately from its other operations, but while the company confirmed this is so, it declined to offer an explanation. Neither did Microsoft nor Google.
[...] A recent report from Uptime Institute warned that prioritizing AI growth threatens to trump sustainability commitments in many territories, and that targets for greenhouse gas emissions to become net zero by a set date are almost certain to be put out of reach.
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