Data centers are as integral to modern life as running water or electric lights, but we are only just coming to terms with their enormous environmental impacts. If we cannot stop using data centers, how do we mitigate their impacts on the world we have to live in?

Tailpipe has built software for measuring the power draw of GPUs in cloud servers and is delighted to now make that software open source.

By 2030, datacenters are expected to consume 3% of global electricity consumption, driven by the exponential growth in AI usage. As the internet becomes increasingly over-saturated with AI content, we must consider: is the environmental cost worth the output?

We’ve built Tailpipe to make it easy for organizations to measure and reduce the carbon emissions of their cloud computing workloads. Now, with the Tailpipe API, you can bring that same visibility and intelligence directly into your own tools, dashboards, and workflows.

How Tailpipe and Common Crawl are Tracking and Reducing Web Crawl Carbon Emissions: At the start of 2025, Tailpipe and Common Crawl teamed up to measure the carbon emissions generated by Common Crawl’s frequent internet-wide web crawl.

Cloud computing services based in a data center in India can produce almost 10 times more emissions than the same services in a data center in Switzerland. Understanding carbon intensity and data center location is key to managing cloud carbon emissions.

Because of the prevalence of CO2 in the atmosphere, all seven greenhouse gases are usually measured in units of CO2e, or ‘carbon dioxide equivalent’. This is a way of describing the impact of each different greenhouse gas in a single unit.

Recent research has found that Cloud Service Provider (CSP) operational emissions are likely to be nearly eight times higher than publicly disclosed.

In 2025, many organizations will have to start reporting their cloud computing carbon emissions. This change is indicative of a wider expansion to the regulations that require organizations – small, medium, and large – to report the carbon emissions that they produce.

The three major cloud service providers (CSPs) – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) – all offer tools that enable their customers to understand the carbon emissions that have been emitted as a consequence of their use of the cloud computing services. There are varying degrees of quality between CSPs’ carbon tools, and shortcomings can be identified across five critical areas: accuracy, completeness, granularity, timeliness, and recommendations.

To reduce your cloud spend and carbon emissions, Tailpipe will suggest tailored recommendations based on your organization’s specific cloud usage. These recommendations are based on four principles.

Across the month of September 2024, Tailpipe’s own use of cloud computing produced 8.31 kgCO2e of emissions, of which 1.82 kgCO2e were embodied emissions, and 6.49 kgCO2e were operational emissions. That’s the equivalent of driving 33 miles (53 km) in a typical petrol car. 

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services – servers, storage, networking, software, analytics, and artificial intelligence – on-demand and accessed over the internet. This energy consumption releases emissions into the atmosphere, contributing 1% of all global emissions – as much as the entire aviation industry produces every six months.