Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) measures the efficiency of a data center. PUE is a recognized standard that was developed by The Green Grid. A PUE of 1 would imply that all power is used on the servers alone, with nothing wasted and no additional energy consumed for cooling.
Where data center specific PUEs are available, Tailpipe uses these actual values. These may be published publicly or given to Tailpipe directly by the cloud provider (it should be noted that different cloud service providers may use different methodologies for calculating PUE). However, for some data centers, cloud providers do not make this information available. This is largely the case for AWS data centers. In these cases, Tailpipe uses a PUE value of 1.22. This is based on a blog post from April 2024 in which AWS cites a 2023 IDC report stating that public cloud data centers have an average PUE of 1.22.
Tailpipe uses this 1.22 figure to represent the PUE of any data center that it does not have a specific PUE for, with an awareness that the actual figure is likely to vary based on the physical location of a data center and its age.
