The final factor to account for when calculating embodied emissions is the lifespan of the hardware, and the customer’s use as a percentage of that lifespan. Because cloud services are abstracted from the underlying hardware, and server resources can be used by different organizations over time, an organization that does not use a service or virtual machine for the full lifespan of the underlying hardware not responsible for the entire quantity of embodied emissions.
Server hardware is in operation for six years, on average. The three major Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) – AWS, Azure, and GCP – all commit to this six year lifespan (WatersTechnology, 2024). Tailpipe therefore accounts for an organization’s usage as a proportion of that six-year lifespan.
Tailpipe finds the organization’s usage period in the billing reports from the organization’s cloud service provider. It divides the organization’s period of use by the total six year lifespan, and multiplies the total embodied emissions figure by the resulting fraction.
For example, if an organization had paid for the use of a service for one year, and that service is responsible for 50 kg of embodied CO2e, the organization would be responsible for a sixth of those emissions:
50 * (1/6) = 8.33 kgCO2e
This six year lifespan applies to all server hardware with the exception of servers with GPUs or machine learning chips, such as the AWS Accelerated Computing family, and the Azure N-Series. The high power demands of AI processes puts more strain on the hardware that hosts these services, leading to more frequent replacements. In 2025, AWS announced that:
‘We… are changing the useful lives of a subset of our servers and networking equipment, effective January 1, 2025, from six years to five years… These two changes above are due to an increased pace of technology development, particularly in the area of artificial intelligence and machine learning’.
Tailpipe therefore applies a five year lifespan to these servers.
