What is embodied carbon?
Embodied carbon is the greenhouse gas emitted making, transporting and disposing of hardware, separate from the emissions of running it.
Why it matters
For servers, embodied carbon covers chip fabrication, memory, drives, power supplies, chassis and other parts, plus transport and end-of-life processing. These emissions happen before the hardware is switched on, so they are spread over its working life. Without them, a cloud footprint shows only the electricity side and leaves out the hardware every workload depends on. For a cloud customer, embodied emissions fall under Scope 3.
An example
Chips are usually the largest part, and their emissions scale with die area and process node. A square centimetre of 5 nm chip carries about twice the emissions of a square centimetre of 28 nm chip. So two servers that look alike on paper can carry very different embodied footprints, depending on the processors and accelerators inside them.
How Greenpixie measures it
Greenpixie builds embodied emissions component by component:
- chips from published die areas and process nodes
- memory and SSDs from capacity and die density
- power supplies, chassis, fans and boards from Dell's server life cycle assessments
- GPUs from NVIDIA's product carbon footprints
The server total is spread over its assumed lifespan, then split by vCPU, memory and accelerator, so each instance takes its share for the hours it is billed. A data centre building allowance is added. End of life follows the GHG Protocol's recycled content method, so no recycling credits are taken.
Sources
- Greenpixie Cloud methodology: 3. Definitions
- Greenpixie Cloud methodology: 7. Assessment and Calculation
- Greenpixie Embodied Emissions methodology: overview
- Greenpixie Embodied Emissions methodology: 7. Assessment and Calculation
- Greenpixie Cloud methodology: 2. Scope and Applicability
- GPX Cloud methodology diagram