OVHcloud has taken a fresh swing at a growing concern in tech: not just how powerful your cloud services are, but how much they cost the planet. The company’s newly updated Environmental Impact Tracker now gives users a clearer, more grounded view of the emissions tied to their infrastructure choices—starting with carbon and expanding soon into water, land, and material impact.
The latest version broadens its coverage beyond just Public Cloud Compute, now including Baremetal and Hosted Private Cloud. Support for additional services like storage and web hosting is on the way. What sets this tool apart isn’t the breadth alone, but the depth. It now blends national energy averages with supplier-specific electricity data, creating a more localized, accurate picture of cloud emissions.
This concerns how much energy users consume while servers are running. The tool also factors in emissions from manufacturing, daily operations, and even the environmental cost of reusing or refurbishing hardware. For users running global workloads, these granular insights could be a wake-up call—or a roadmap for change.
A third-party review by digital sustainability firm IJO called the methodology transparent and consistent with industry standards. Still, what matters most is how users respond. Will data like this shift how developers deploy? Will it change procurement priorities? That remains to be seen.
OVHcloud has been vocal about sustainability for years, but this tool adds a layer of measurable transparency. It lets users look under the hood of their infrastructure and see more than just cost or performance metrics. They now get to weigh environmental tradeoffs, too.
As OVHcloud prepares the next wave of updates to cover broader ecological factors like water use and land impact, the tool hints at where the industry might go next. Quietly, and maybe finally, cloud users are getting the kind of visibility that turns intention into action.
