A cloud provider that specializes in compute will have vastly higher energy costs than a cloud provider that specializes in storage. Even without explicit specialization, it's not unreasonable to assume that the distribution of compute-heavy and storage-heavy customers is quite different between providers. So you'd have to sort of calculate that out.
But if you do that, I'm not sure what would even differentiate them. They're all using essentially the same hardware. They all have the same cooling requirements. I wouldn't expect an average to be very interesting.
Carbon neutrality is a flawed statistic IMO and can be doctored with a lot - e.g. if Google pays a company X to plant an amount of trees, who's to say that neutralizes carbon?
Keep it simple, just publish how much power they're using and what the sources are.
I’m not sure what you mean by publish “what the power sources are.” Data centers are grid connected and are therefore connected to a lot of different generators—including coal, natural gas, wind, solar, and hydro. All generators on the grid contribute to the grid. It’s really tough to single out a generation source for a particular user.
I remember walking by a google data centre on the Columbia river years ago and being told that it was sighted there so that it could use the power from the dam.
Personally, I don’t understand carbon neutrality. How deep does this rabbit hole go? If Google only buys and uses fully electric cars for street view and use only solar and wind to power them is that good enough? Does the manufacture of the car, batteries, solar panels also have to be carbon neutral? If not, can a company become carbon neutral by simply letting another company do the dirty work?
I know that Microsoft's datacenters, and probably many other, are parked next to cheap power sources like hydro plants that aren't near any major demand sources.
Cooling is a pretty big factor in the energy usage of datacenters, and there's a lot of room for creative use of technology there - or simply geographic advantages.
It's a lot smaller than you think these days with all the effort that has gone into it.
Google reports an average PUE[1] of 1.11 over the past year, 1.09 over the past quarter, and the latest/best data centers are at 1.06 [2]. In simple terms this means that the total power overhead for cooling etc is just 6% of that to power the machines in them.
Google (and others) have gone to great lengths using AI, and radical new ideas for cooling.
Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not in Datacenters. All info public domain
No, because computer chips don't operate at 100°C (let alone 300°C like a nuclear reactor). Low-temperature heat flows contain little usable work. Typically the best option is to dump the spare heat into the nearest body of water, or into the air.
I agree it's rather strange to ask for who has the lowest energy usage when you're a cloud customer. "I want to rent this computer to do X, but it shouldn't consume any electricity" is not a reasonable demand.
However: one could say that these companies are now big enough that it is reasonable to start demanding that these companies source the energy in a climate-friendly way. I think it's not at all unreasonable to demand that when Google or Amazon builds massive new data centers to be responsible about how those data centers are powered.
But if you do that, I'm not sure what would even differentiate them. They're all using essentially the same hardware. They all have the same cooling requirements. I wouldn't expect an average to be very interesting.