Scope 1/2/3 Emissions

Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions are the three categories in the GHG Protocol accounting framework used to classify a company's greenhouse gas footprint. Scope 1 covers direct emissions from sources a data center owns or controls, such as diesel backup generators; Scope 2 covers indirect emissions from purchased electricity, heating, or cooling; and Scope 3 covers all other indirect emissions across the value chain, including embodied carbon in construction materials, server and GPU manufacturing, and business travel. For most data centers, Scope 2 electricity use is the largest share of the footprint, which is why operators pursue PPAs and renewable energy certificates to reduce it, while Scope 3 is the hardest to measure and increasingly scrutinized as hyperscalers disclose supply-chain emissions from AI hardware production. Sustainability reports now commonly break out all three scopes separately, since combining them can obscure where real reductions are happening.