SAP Puts Product-Level Cloud Emissions and Energy Data in Customers’ Hands

SAP is making the carbon footprint of cloud software visible product by product, customer by customer.

As climate disclosure requirements tighten and AI-driven workloads reshape cloud infrastructure, organizations need granular, credible emissions data across their value chains. Cloud software is now a material part of most companies’ IT landscapes, yet the industry default remains spend-based estimation: a single carbon intensity factor applied uniformly, regardless of which product a customer runs, where it is hosted, or how much infrastructure it actually consumes. Spend-based data meets minimum reporting thresholds, but it cannot reveal where emissions concentrate or where reduction levers exist.

With SAP’s cloud product carbon footprint, customers can see the emissions and energy consumption associated with their use of supported SAP cloud products, calculated from the infrastructure activity that serves them. This moves beyond spend-based averages to help give customers a clearer view of their cloud footprint and where potential opportunities to reduce it exist.

A new methodology

SAP’s cloud product carbon footprint (PCF) helps provide customers with activity-based emissions and energy data for selected SAP cloud products.

The core of the approach is a bottom-up energy model. Every day, SAP calculates the electrical consumption of each physical and virtual server running its cloud products, based on CPU utilization, memory allocation, and the power usage effectiveness (PUE) of each data center.

Based on the data foundation in SAP’s corporate Configuration Management Database CCIR, the server-level energy figure is then allocated to specific products and customer tenants through SAP’s infrastructure dependency mapping, a graph-based model that traces which hardware resources serve which customers based on the products and services consumed by them. The result: each customer sees the emissions and energy consumption associated with its use of each SAP cloud product. It’s a product-specific, customer-specific figure, grounded in actual infrastructure activity.

The methodology is aligned to the GHG Protocol ICT Sector Guidance. The approach, which uses electricity consumption as the leading allocation metric, has been developed with awareness of how leading cloud infrastructure providers structure their own activity-based methodologies. The full methodology document is publicly available for customers and auditors to review.

What this means for customers

SAP developed this methodology in close collaboration with customers across industries, including financial services, consumer goods, media, and healthcare, as well as cloud infrastructure experts. Through this validation process, customers consistently highlighted a key limitation of spend-based approaches. While these provide a reporting number, they do not reveal where emissions concentrate or where reduction opportunities exist. Several customers described spend-based data as essentially “blind” when it comes to identifying which products or deployment regions drive their cloud footprint.

Activity-based, product-level data helps address that gap. For the first time, it can give customers the ability to identify emissions hotspots and potential reduction levers at the level of individual cloud products and deployment locations.

The shift also reflects a broader dynamic in supply chain emissions reporting. When customers report their Scope 3 emissions, their cloud software providers are part of that calculation. SAP is one of its customers’ suppliers, and customers are increasingly asking their suppliers for primary, activity-based data rather than estimates. Building the PCF is SAP providing to its customers the same quality of data it asks of its own suppliers.

SAP as customer zero

SAP uses the same PCF methodology and data for its own cloud portfolio. The visibility we offer customers is the same visibility we apply internally to measure the sustainability performance of our products and to inform our net-zero journey.

What the PCF provides internally is a level of granularity that did not previously exist: emissions and energy data specific to each product, each customer, and each region. The leverage points for reducing a product’s footprint, such as infrastructure efficiency, workload optimization, and deployment choices, can now be identified and prioritized at the product level rather than addressed through broad, portfolio-wide measures.

What is available today

SAP’s cloud product carbon footprint is accessible now through the Finance & Legal section of SAP for Me for a growing list of cloud products, including SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP Integrated Business Planning, SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Datasphere, SAP Analytics Cloud, and SAP Commerce Cloud. The underlying methodology is published, aligned to the GHG Protocol ICT Sector Guidance, and publicly available. The full and up-to-date list of covered products is published in the methodology document, which is updated quarterly.

For customers using the activity-based PCF alongside SAP’s existing spend-based carbon intensity factor, the spend-based method continues to be available and remains the reference approach for emissions reporting at this stage. Over time, as the activity-based methodology matures and product coverage expands, SAP’s positioning on this will evolve accordingly. As with any carbon accounting methodology, customers should assess their approach in line with their own reporting frameworks and auditor expectations.

Outlook

With a published methodology, a growing product portfolio, and data already accessible to customers, the cloud product carbon footprint is an established capability that SAP intends to continue developing.

In the coming quarters, SAP plans to expand product coverage across its cloud portfolio. Work toward ISO 14067 alignment and external audit readiness is underway. The roadmap includes more detailed scope breakdowns, higher time-resolution data, and integration-ready formats for customers embedding carbon data into their own reporting and operational workflows. SAP is also actively working to reflect the specific emissions profile of AI workloads within the PCF framework. As customers increasingly adopt AI-powered cloud services, extending coverage to these workloads is a near-term priority.

For questions about how product-level emissions data can support sustainability and cloud decisions, customers are welcome to reach out to their local SAP contact. SAP also welcomes dialogue with ecosystem peers working on green software or ICT carbon standards.

Cloud transformation is increasingly measured on carbon transparency alongside performance, cost, and security. As a frontrunner in activity-based SaaS carbon footprinting, SAP is committed to building that capability openly and to evolving it together with customers and partners.

For questions, contact sustainability@sap.com.

Matthias Medert is global head of Sustainability at SAP.