5 Tech Giants Fair Poor in Energy Consumption


Bangalore: The entire computing is happening in cloud and the cloud is driven by datacenters of tech titans located across the globe. Did you ever know how these datacenters are powered or how much they pollute the environment for storing our own documents and pictures? Well, to bring the world’s attention to this matter, Greenpeace organization, last week released a study named “How clean is your cloud,” which scrutinized the energy choices of the major tech titans and graded them.

Surprisingly, the world’s most reputed company Apple, along with Microsoft and Amazon were turned out to be the worst echo-friendly tech companies whereas the companies including Google, Yahoo and Facebook received high grades in the study.

"When people around the world share their music or photos on the cloud, they want to know that the cloud is powered by clean, safe energy," said Gary Cook, Greenpeace International Senior Policy Analyst. "Yet highly innovative and profitable companies like Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft are building data centres powered by coal and acting like their customers won't know or won't care. They are wrong," he continued.  

Here is the list of 8 Tech titans and their energy grades.

Apple

Apple is heavily criticized in the report for having highest percentage of its energy sourced from coal and for their growing fleets of data centres which is powered by coal and nuclear energy. But apple fights back the report by calling the findings as outdated and claiming that the company’s new North Carolina Data centre is “the greenest datacenter ever built.”

Energy used from Non renewable sources: 55.1 percent

Clean Energy: 15.3 Percent

Grade: D