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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story [theregister.com]:

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.

Amazon has chosen not break out data on environmental stats such as greenhouse gas emissions for AWS from the rest of the company...

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 [theguardian.com] 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.

Like many other large corporations, Amazon began issuing an annual sustainability report [aboutamazon.com] some years back to spell out the progress the group is making against its own environmental, social, and governance goals.

In this respect, Amazon is acting along broadly similar lines as other hyperscale companies such as Google and Microsoft.

But unlike those companies, Amazon's reports appear to indicate that its overall emissions have been declining since 2021, despite the continued growth in its cloud computing division, datacenter expansion and the AI services driven by powerful servers crammed with energy-hungry GPUs.

How likely is it that the world's largest cloud operator has managed to somehow cut its emissions, when those of Microsoft have increased by nearly 30 percent [theregister.com] since 2020, and Google has reported a rise of 48 percent [theregister.com] since 2019?

Last year, Amazon disclosed that its capital expenditure was expected to top $75 billion [theregister.com] for the whole of 2024, most of which was invested in its cloud infrastructure, thanks to rising demand for services such as generative AI, with more planned for this year. It's forecast to be even higher this year, as is Microsoft [theregister.com]'s.

Amazon isn't the sole offender: neither Microsoft nor Google breaks out the emissions of their datacenters separately from the main business.

In an interview with The Register, Ben Caddy, Canalys analyst, said: "The environmental impact of AWS is not broken out specifically, and you can only find the emissions of Amazon overall. In fairness, Google and Microsoft similarly publish annual sustainability reports for their wider respective companies, reflecting emissions beyond their cloud businesses."

In its most recent sustainability report, Amazon published a separate AWS Summary, Caddy notes, which details carbon savings made from datacenter design practices, circularity and efficiency in hardware.

"However, it doesn't include AWS-specific Scopes 1, 2, and 3 carbon emissions; there is no public disclosure that allows you to meaningfully understand the carbon emissions of AWS specifically."

"Simply put, as it is currently reported, AWS-specific emissions data is not broken out, and so this is lost within the wider environmental impact of Amazon's entire business, including its huge retail division," Caddy states.

Microsoft publishes the carbon footprint for the entire organization, and while it does include Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions in its sustainability report, Microsoft didn't respond to our specfic question about its datacenters. Google told us: "We don't separate datacenter data from our overall operations."

With legislation such as the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) now in force, customers and resellers alike are expecting more detailed carbon emissions reporting across all three Scopes from suppliers and vendors, according to Canalys.

This expectation of transparency is increasingly important in vendor selection processes because customers need their vendors to share specific numbers to quantify the environmental impact of their cloud usage.

"AWS has continued to fall behind its competitors here by not providing Scope 3 emissions data via its Customer Carbon Footprint Tool, which is still unavailable," Caddy claimed.

"This issue has frustrated sustainability-focused customers and partners alike for years now, but as companies prepare for CSRD disclosure, this lack of granular emissions disclosure from AWS can create compliance challenges for EU-based AWS customers."

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.

In a statement, an AWS spokesperson told us: "We continue to publish a detailed, transparent report of our year-on-year progress decarbonizing our operations, including across our datacenters, in our Sustainability Report. This is in addition to sharing new programs and business updates throughout the year such as our work to increase the energy efficiency of our datacenters through advances in cooling, hardware design, extend and data management strategy optimization, among others, which are outlined in our publicly available AWS Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) report.

"We're also working to decrease the carbon footprint of our datacenters, including by using carbon-free sources of energy, using lower-carbon alternatives for building construction, increasing operational efficiency, and expanding our existing circularity efforts to design equipment better, operate longer, and recover more. Last year we announced that Amazon achieved its goal of matching 100 percent of the electricity used in its operations, including at its datacenters, with renewable energy, significantly reducing Amazon's Scope 2 emissions."

A recent report from Uptime Institute warned [theregister.com] 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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