Obviously data centers shouldn't lie about the emissions, but it would be interesting to know how e.g. Amazon compares to the on-prem setup their offerings frequently replaces. Apple and Meta is a little different, in that none of their data center capacity directly replaces anything, it's all "extra".
Internally we had an interesting discussion, about travelling. Some one brought up that it might not look good that we fly to frequently, or at all. That's true, but it's also a very visible and easy to understand thing to focus on. One engineer does some quick napkin math and suggests that we optimize our code instead, as that would save more CO2 yearly, compared to us not flying. To me that's a really good indication of something that's wrong in the industry, we're not optimizing our code anymore, we're barely able to get rid of rarely used code and infrastructure, because keeping it running isn't really that expensive anymore.
Again, data centers shouldn't lie about emissions, but what difference would it make it they didn't? We're the ones buying the capacity, rather than moving to on-device computing, rather than an always running cloud. We spin up way more infrastructure than we should, because it's easy, and it doesn't cost that much.
Internally we had an interesting discussion, about travelling. Some one brought up that it might not look good that we fly to frequently, or at all. That's true, but it's also a very visible and easy to understand thing to focus on. One engineer does some quick napkin math and suggests that we optimize our code instead, as that would save more CO2 yearly, compared to us not flying. To me that's a really good indication of something that's wrong in the industry, we're not optimizing our code anymore, we're barely able to get rid of rarely used code and infrastructure, because keeping it running isn't really that expensive anymore.
Again, data centers shouldn't lie about emissions, but what difference would it make it they didn't? We're the ones buying the capacity, rather than moving to on-device computing, rather than an always running cloud. We spin up way more infrastructure than we should, because it's easy, and it doesn't cost that much.