Digital & Cloud Emission Factors

69 digital and cloud emission factors held in the GreenCalculus MasterBrain, drawn from 5 named sources, each listed with its publisher and licence under Sources below. Values are read live from the data layer on every page build. They span 15 units of measurement, which is why the spread below is reported per unit and never blended.

Where these factors are used

Website & Pageview Carbon, Data-Centre PUE and Cloud Compute Allocation set out how these values are applied, and Website Carbon Calculator, Cloud Storage Carbon Calculator and Data-Centre PUE Calculator draw on them directly. The Google Cloud region figures are also deposited as a citable dataset with a DOI, as Google Cloud Region Carbon Intensity.

Most of this family is not on this page, and that is deliberate

The digital section of the data layer holds 165 factors. This page carries 69 of them. The other 96 come from publishers whose terms permit citation but not republication as a table — NVIDIA and Dell product carbon footprints, AWS methodology constants, Seagate storage LCAs, IEA and Carbon Trust streaming figures, Epoch AI inference estimates, and a set of academic papers posted under author-retained arXiv terms. One source, the Lövehagen device study, is CC BY-NC-ND, which forbids both commercial reuse and derivatives.

Those figures are not hidden: they are named and cited on the methodology pages that use them, and the calculators read them straight from the data layer. What is withheld is the right to reprint them here as a downloadable table, which is not ours to give. If a number you need is missing from this page, the methodology page for that topic will tell you who published it and where to find it.

What this group contains

Figures are computed per unit and never blended: a median across different units would be arithmetically valid and physically meaningless. 11 further units in this group have fewer than 3 factors and are counted above but not described.

What has changed

Sources, citation & machine access

Cite the upstream publisher for the values themselves. The reference below credits this compilation and, more usefully, pins the edition you read.

Say, Jeremiah (2026). Digital & Cloud Emission Factors (MasterBrain v2026.203). GreenCalculus. https://greencalculus.com/factors/digital-cloud-emission-factors/

Cite this factor group

Values change between editions. Quoting the MasterBrain version is what lets a reader resolve the exact number you used. See the change record above for factors in this group that have moved.

For a reference manager, in BibTeX then RIS:

@misc{greencalculus_digital_2026,
  author       = {Say, Jeremiah},
  title        = {Digital & Cloud Emission Factors},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {GreenCalculus},
  note         = {MasterBrain v2026.203},
  url          = {https://greencalculus.com/factors/digital-cloud-emission-factors/}
}

TY  - DATA
AU  - Say, Jeremiah
TI  - Digital & Cloud Emission Factors
PY  - 2026
PB  - GreenCalculus
ET  - MasterBrain v2026.203
UR  - https://greencalculus.com/factors/digital-cloud-emission-factors/
ER  - 

Every factor on this page is readable from the open endpoint. No key, no signup:

https://greencalculus.com/wp-json/greencalculus/v1/factors/digital

curl -s "https://greencalculus.com/wp-json/greencalculus/v1/factors/digital?limit=500"

import requests
rows = requests.get("https://greencalculus.com/wp-json/greencalculus/v1/factors/digital", params={"limit": 500}).json()["factors"]
print(len(rows), "factors in digital")

The endpoint returns 89 more rows than this table: rows this page deliberately leaves out.

Or as a spreadsheet: 45 of the 69 rows on this page, each with its source, the edition it last changed in, and its own link:

https://greencalculus.com/wp-json/greencalculus/v1/factors-export?page=digital-cloud-emission-factors

Download this table as CSV

The download leaves out 24 rows from SWD_MODEL_V4, IEA_AI_ENERGY_2025, SWD_MODEL_V3, whose terms do not give us the right to pass their figures on in a file. They stay on this page, each beside its source, and in the endpoint above, where every row carries licence.redistributable. The per-publisher terms are on the sources register.

Both responses carry an X-GC-Version header, so a consumer can detect a new edition without diffing the payload. The CSV filename carries the edition too, so two downloads months apart do not collide.

All factors

Last changed names the data-layer edition in which a factor last took a new value, reconstructed from every released edition since v2025.13. A dash means the value has not moved since tracking began, which is the answer to "is the figure I used last year still current?".

Common questions