Mark Butcher on AWS sustainability claims
Sustainable IT expert lays into AWS:
3 years after shouting about Amazons total lack of transparency with sustainability reporting, here’s a list of what I think they’ve achieved:
1) They let you export a CSV for 3 lines of numbers showing your last months made up numbers that are up to 99% too low
2) Urmmm…. that’s about it
[….] I know of several very large enterprise orgs starting to proactively marginalise them (i.e. not move away 100%, but massively reducing consumption). The one’s I know about will cost them around $1 billion of spend. Is that enough to make them pay attention?
This article from Canalys in the Register says “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.”
They follow up with “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.”
Interesting isn’t it… if they were actually as sustainable as they pretend, you’d expect them to share open and honest numbers, instead what we get are marketing puff pieces making what seem like invented PUE claims backed by zero evidence.
Elsewhere he notes “AWS customers are still unable to natively measure actual power consumption, report on actual carbon emissions, report on water usage. This’ll make life interesting for all those AI companies subject to legislation like the EU AI Act or needing to report to the EED and similar.”
(Via ClimateAction.tech)
Tags: climate-change aws sustainability pue reporting amazon cloud datacenters emissions