Scope 3, Category 8: What Akamai Is Doing for Customer Reporting
Today’s sustainability landscape demands greater transparency and more robust carbon accounting than ever before. For many organizations, capturing Scope 3 emissions, the indirect emissions that occur throughout a company’s value chain, is a major challenge. Within Scope 3, Category 8 (Upstream Leased Assets) specifically addresses emissions from assets that a company contracts, leases, or rents but does not own or directly control.
At Akamai, our Custom Emissions Reports are designed to give you detailed, credible emissions data for the operations we conduct on your behalf, making it easier to capture these emissions in your inventory.
Understanding Scope 3, Category 8: Why it matters
When companies think about their carbon footprint, the first things that often come to mind are the emissions they produce directly (Scope 1) and those associated with their energy purchases (Scope 2). Yet a significant portion of most organizations’ climate impact lies beyond these direct sources, in Scope 3, particularly in the upstream value chain.
Scope 3, Category 8 (Upstream Leased Assets) specifically addresses the emissions from assets that an organization does not own but rather contracts for or otherwise uses as part of its operations.
The “leased assets” analogy
Think of Scope 3, Category 8 like leased office space. If you utilize space on a whole floor in a building, you are indirectly responsible for the utility use in your area, even if you never see the building’s full utility bill. The same concept applies when you use someone else’s servers in a data center or cloud: You’re contracting for your use of Akamai’s compute, security software and services, and delivery capacities.
Although Akamai owns the servers and is responsible for maintaining them, all while the colocation or data center provider is licensing power to us, they run on your behalf and consume electricity as a result of your operations. That electricity, in turn, creates carbon emissions that are ultimately a part of your overall footprint.
Why Category 8 often gets overlooked
Despite its significance for operating in the cloud, Category 8 can be overlooked or underestimated for three reasons:
Limited visibility: Many organizations focus heavily on Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3, Category 1, because these sources are easier to track, measure, and estimate internally. Emissions from external providers are often less transparent, restricting the ability to categorize with depth.
Data challenges: Cloud providers don’t always share detailed, customer-specific emissions data. This can make it difficult to properly account for contracted infrastructure.
Misallocated emissions: In the absence of clear guidance or reliable data for contracted infrastructure, companies sometimes mistakenly attribute these emissions to Scope 3, Category 1 (Purchased Goods and Services) based on spend, while missing the fact that they may have granular enough data to report with a bit more depth.
The GHG Protocol’s position
The Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol provides guidance for capturing these indirect emissions. Under Category 8, any services that are contracted by your organization and have an associated power value, but do not appear in your Scope 1 or 2, should be included in your Scope 3, Category 8 inventory.
This ensures proper allocation happens for the cloud services in your value chain and that responsibilities for emissions are appropriately accounted for by you as the customer.
Why Akamai’s role matters
For companies that use Akamai’s global network, our servers represent contracted computing resources, even if the actual agreement is not contractual in a traditional sense. We run, power, and maintain them for your content delivery and edge computing tasks. In turn, you benefit from the speed, reliability, and reach of that infrastructure.
Since this use is part of your operational footprint, the GHG Protocol states that the carbon responsibility associated with the power consumption and the resulting emissions belongs to you as the beneficiary of that service.
The Akamai advantage
Akamai’s Custom Emissions Reports cut through the complexities and help you align with the GHG Protocol’s Scope 3, Category 8 requirements by:
Providing accurate, customer-specific data on the power used by Akamai servers to deliver your traffic or run your workloads
Translating data into the terminology and frameworks you need for corporate sustainability reporting by removing guesswork or extrapolation
By addressing these emissions in a structured, transparent way, we’re ensuring that what often slips through the cracks no longer does — allowing you to paint a complete and accurate picture of your carbon footprint. This clarity not only strengthens your Scope 3 reporting but also equips you to make better-informed decisions about your cloud strategies, efficiency improvements, and potential optimizations to reduce energy consumption and emissions.
How Akamai’s Custom Emissions Reports work
There are four steps that make this data usable for a customer’s reporting, including
Collecting facility data
Akamai measures the electricity used by every server and network device in our global colocation sites, recording exactly when and where each kilowatt-hour is consumed. We then convert that use into a precise, market-specific carbon footprint by applying multiple emissions factors for continuity:
Location-based — the average grid mix for each balancing authority)
Market-based — the emissions profile of contracted energy sources such as PPAs and RECs)
Balancing authority — the average grid rates published by regional operators)
Location marginal —the carbon intensity of the next unit of electricity needed to meet incremental demand)
Marginal Operating Emissions Rate (MOER) — a real-time, sub-hourly signal showing which generators actually ramp up or down.
Because every reading is tied back to the exact hardware model consuming the power, we can accurately calculate the total emissions impact of our services in each region that we serve to ensure a consistent view.
Allocating based on use
We map customers’ workloads to the servers, regions, and countries in which they are using and deploying service. For instance, your use in a particular data center is measured by byte utilization and machine utilization. We take that data and allocate the appropriate proportion of that data center’s energy use and emissions to your account.
Breaking down emissions by GHG Protocol category
We don’t just hand over a single emissions figure. Instead, we align our reporting structure to the GHG Protocol, categorizing the allocated emissions so that you can plug them right into your own Scope 3, Category 8 reporting.
Providing easy-to-read, detailed reports
Because we pair these specific details from our hardware and data points with the emissions impact and detailed reporting, we are able to precisely attribute an emissions impact to each customer and the services they consume when using Akamai. Our custom emissions analysis gives our customers the ability to understand:
- Actual energy use — megawatt-hours drawn by Akamai equipment
- Facility efficiency — Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metrics
- Renewable share — the percentage of that energy sourced from renewables
- Total emissions impact — related to the specific market emissions impact
- Grid losses — carbon impacts from transmission and distribution losses
Our approach gives our customers a clear end-to-end picture of their carbon footprint when they run their most critical operations across our infrastructure. This concise summary makes the report easy to integrate into internal analytics tools, sustainability dashboards, or investor-facing disclosures.
What makes our reporting superior
Akamai’s approach stands out for several reasons, especially when you compare us with other major infrastructure and cloud service providers, including:
- More complete data
- Tailored for GHG Protocol Scope 3, Category 8
- Granular transparency
- Easy integration into your ESG reporting
- Human-centric service
More complete data
Some providers only provide one rolled-up number. Akamai goes further by including data such as total power consumed, total renewables attributed, total emissions impact, baseline emissions, and emissions reduced by country to name a few from the extensive list. The result: a more accurate representation of your total carbon footprint for upstream leased assets reporting.
Tailored for GHG Protocol Scope 3, Category 8
Our Custom Emissions Reports provide a single emissions number with details on how we got there. That’s a subtle but important advantage if you want a straightforward way to integrate these numbers into your broader corporate climate disclosures.
Granular transparency
For organizations that want deeper insight, we provide data at a granular level, drilling down into energy consumption and emissions factors by country. While other providers may group entire continents or broader geographies together, we strive to give you more localized data, which can help you make decisions about optimizing your compute, security, and delivery services across our global footprint.
Easy integration into your ESG reporting
Rather than making you manually parse unwieldy datasets, our approach includes streamlined, consumable ESG reporting that translate seamlessly into your existing sustainability frameworks.
Human-centric service
Upon request, we can walk you through the numbers, clarifying methodology and assumptions. This personalized assistance ensures that you fully understand and can effectively use the data. In contrast, automated dashboards from other providers sometimes leave you with unanswered questions about their methodology.
Emissions data you can trust
We know that trust is essential in emissions accounting. That’s why we align with the GHG Protocol, the internationally recognized standard that ensures our data can be easily integrated into your reporting structures.
We maintain verified corporate emissions. Our own total corporate footprint is verified, giving us and our customers confidence that the data is rooted in a validated process. We conduct regular updates as our facilities, servers, and use patterns evolve rapidly. Our Custom Emissions Reports are designed to adapt accordingly, giving you updated numbers that reflect real-world conditions.
The keys to better climate action
Why does this accuracy matter? Accurate Scope 3 data in Category 8 can influence strategic decisions that yield both environmental and business benefits:
Targeted cloud optimization: With granular data on which regions or data centers drive the most emissions, you can potentially reroute or optimize your approach, reducing both carbon emissions and costs.
Accurate benchmarking: Knowing exactly how much of your upstream emissions that stem from Akamai’s infrastructure helps you benchmark against internal targets, pinpointing where optimizing could be the most useful.
Enhanced stakeholder transparency: Whether it’s your board, your customers, or your investors, demonstrating that you are accurately accounting for the emissions in your value chain and allocating appropriately underscores your commitment to real climate action.
Future-proofing against regulatory pressure: As governments worldwide introduce more stringent climate regulations, being able to show a well-documented, transparent Scope 3 inventory places you ahead of the curve.
A more holistic way to track and understand emissions levels
In a world where carbon accountability is increasingly non-negotiable, leveraging Akamai’s Custom Emissions Reports for Scope 3, Category 8 reporting can give you a competitive edge. It’s not just about meeting a requirement; it’s about proactively shaping your sustainability roadmap.
By enabling you to capture the operational upstream emissions from your Akamai use, these reports support deeper strategic insights and stronger stakeholder trust. Our methodology, grounded in the GHG Protocol, delivers a level of detail and clarity that you simply won’t find with most other providers. And because we are as committed to your sustainability goals as you are, we’ll stand beside you to ensure that you’re making the most of these insights.
Learn more
Check out more details on our approach:
With better data at your disposal, you can refine your climate strategies, demonstrate the full scope of your emissions accountability, and take real action to reduce your environmental impact. Let’s continue to tackle Scope 3 emissions together, one watt at a time.
