What are Scope 3 emissions?

Why it matters

The GHG Protocol Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Standard sets out 15 categories of activity upstream and downstream of a company's own operations, from purchased goods to business travel and the use of sold products. The GHG Protocol notes that the majority of total corporate emissions come from Scope 3 sources.

For a cloud customer, public cloud emissions fall in Scope 3, usually under Category 1, purchased goods and services. That includes the provider's data centre electricity and the emissions from making its servers. The customer cannot meter either directly, so it needs a way to estimate them from what it does see, its usage.

An example

A GPU instance shows how much sits outside the electricity bill. Its share of the server's chips, high bandwidth memory, board and cooling was emitted at manufacture, before its first hour of use. Those embodied emissions, plus the upstream emissions of producing the fuel for its electricity, all land in the customer's Scope 3.

How Greenpixie measures it

Greenpixie's cloud data covers the Scope 3 parts of cloud usage:

• embodied emissions from making, transporting and disposing of server hardware
• an allowance for the data centre building
• upstream emissions from producing the fuel used to generate electricity
• transmission and distribution losses, reported as Category 3

Other categories, such as business travel or employee commuting, are out of scope. AI per-token carbon follows the same pattern, combining operational emissions with amortised embodied emissions of server hardware.