Microsoft Corp. has started sharing information about the electricity usage of Azure cloud regions with some customers, who it hopes will use the data to lower the carbon footprint of their Azure deployments.

The news comes weeks after a similar move by Google LLC, one of Microsoft’s top rivals in the cloud market. 

Microsoft’s decision to share energy usage data was reported by CNBC today. Noelle Walsh, corporate vice president for Microsoft’s Cloud Operations and Innovation business unit, told the news network that the company is sharing the information with customers only if they agree not to publicize it. 

Energy efficiency varies between Azure regions based on factors such as what cooling systems they use. By signing up for access to the energy usage data, Azure customers can identify if they could move their workloads to an Azure region with better energy efficiency than the region they’re currently using. For a large enterprise that runs a big portion of its operations in the cloud, such a switch can potentially noticeably reduce its carbon footprint.

Microsoft’s Walsh also provided a few other details about the initiative. Currently, the executive said, the company is only sharing cloud regions’ high-level energy usage metrics, without breaking out information on the individual data centers that comprise them. Over time, however, the company plans to become “increasingly transparent with some of those numbers,” the executive said. 

That suggests Microsoft might even make some of the data public at some point. For now, however, it’s not doing so because giving all customers access to energy efficiency data might be counterproductive. “If everybody was to pick and choose, the overall optimum might not be the most green solution,” Walsh told CNBC.

Microsoft’s increased focus on data center energy efficiency is part of a plan the company announced last year to become “carbon negative” by 2030, meaning it intends to remove more CO2 from the atmosphere than it produces. The company is experimenting with multiple emerging technologies in a bid to reduce Azure’s environmental footprint. Microsoft recently detailed an internal project to develop new, more power-efficient server cooling systems and is experimenting with using hydrogen fuel cells as a source of backup power for data centers. 

Increasing Azure’s power-efficiency will make it easier for Microsoft to balance its goal of becoming carbon negative by 2030 with the rapid expansion of its data center footprint. Citing Microsoft officials, ZDNet reported today that the company expects to build 50 to 100 new data centers each year for the “foreseeable future.” At the high end of the estimate, that plan could put Microsoft on track to double the total number of Azure data centers it operates within three years. 

It’s unclear whether the estimate for the number of new facilities that will be built per year covers only  standard Azure data centers, or if it also includes Azure Edge Zones. Announced last year, Azure Edge Zones are miniature cloud environments colocated in wireless carriers’ data centers.

The news that Microsoft has started sharing Azure energy usage data with some customers comes weeks after Google began disclosing several carbon emission metrics from its competing public cloud. Google is disclosing data on over 20 cloud regions to start, including an overview of what percentage of the electricity they use comes from renewable sources. 

Photo: Microsoft