After 20 years of exponential growth, the carbon footprint of computing is now greater than that of Saudi Arabia. But increased public awareness of the IT sector’s emissions impact has facilitated new ways of thinking about how we use digital services: carbon-aware computing. These strategies aim to reduce the emissions impact of computing processes, by prioritising renewable energy consumption.

Cloud computing powers over 90% of enterprises, but its impact on carbon remains a black box. While standards exist for manufacturing and logistics emissions, methods for calculating the carbon costs of the cloud are so inconsistent that the two most common approaches produce results differing by 50x. With regulators closing in, that ambiguity is becoming a liability.

Did you know that a short conversation with GPT-4 generates 3 grams of CO2e? With 2.5 billion messages sent to ChatGPT every day, it has never been more important to accurately account for the carbon impact of AI. Fortunately, in a milestone for AI sustainability, the Green Software Foundation has just released the Software Carbon Intensity for AI (SCI for AI) Specification!

Global demand for cloud computing, driven in large part by the expansion of AI, is on an ever-increasing upward trajectory. Attempting to mitigate this expansion is the pursuit of the sustainable data center: facilities that can meet the world’s need for on-demand digital services whilst also being highly energy and water efficient, compatible with local environments, and emitting zero carbon.

Camera Forensics, a digital imaging platform used by crime investigators, wanted to know the carbon impact of the cloud-intensive services. Read their blog to find out how we did it, and what we found.

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.