Cloud has a climate cost. Here's our plan to reduce ours.

Cloud hosting is not invisible. Every project deployed, every resource provisioned, every region selected carries a real energy cost, and that energy cost has a climate cost. At Upsun, we've known this for a while. What we're sharing today is where we stand, what we measured, and what we've committed to doing differently from 2026 onwards.

Our ambition is calibrated to what we can credibly deliver, and we think being upfront about that matters more than overpromising.

What we measured

In 2025, we completed our third (since 2023) full carbon footprint assessment using the GHG Protocol methodology, with Greenly as our climate partner and measurement expert. Our total emissions for the year were 2.57 kt CO2e, or 11 tC02e per employee. 

Here's how that breaks down by category:

• Digital infrastructure: 62%
• Travel and commute: 23%
• Services purchases: 8.1%
• Activities and events: 3.8%
• Product purchases: 2.3%
• Food and drinks: 0.6%
• Other: 0.2%

The headline finding is straightforward: digital infrastructure dominates our footprint, and within that, cloud services account for roughly half of our total company emissions, or around 1,200 tCO2e. That's the number we need to move.

We opted to conduct a voluntary double materiality assessment in 2025 to further align with evolving sustainability reporting standards. It confirmed what the numbers already suggested: energy consumption, emissions, and electronic waste are our most significant areas of environmental impact. These indirect impacts from the value chain aren’t fully within our control, therefore it is vital to onboard our key stakeholders in this climate journey.

Why cloud emissions are the priority

As a fully remote company, we don't have a large physical footprint in the traditional sense. We've eliminated most commuting-related emissions by design, and our Paris headquarters runs on 100% renewable energy. We keep company-wide gatherings once every 18 months. These choices help, but they don't address the core issue.

Our cloud services run on data center infrastructure that requires electricity, cooling, and physical equipment. When that energy comes from high-carbon sources, the emissions are real and measurable. Nearly half of our company footprint traces back to those underlying infrastructure choices, which means that's where we have to focus.

Our commitments, in plain numbers

In 2026, we've built a new climate strategy around three concrete targets, all measured against a 2024 baseline and a 2031 target.

1. Revenue carbon intensity: -27% by 2031

Rather than committing to an absolute reduction (which would be an unrealistic commitment due to our known dependence on the value chain, and the widespread and exponential adoption of AI), we're committing to reducing our carbon intensity per unit of revenue. Our current intensity stands at approximately 88 tCO2e per million euros of ARR. Our target is to bring that down to 62 by 2031, striving for a 27% reduction.

This approach lets us grow while actively decoupling that growth from emissions growth. It requires discipline across every team.

2. Greener regions: 60% of projects by 2031

We define a "greener" region as one where the energy carbon intensity is below 100 gCO2e/kWh. In 2025, 22% of our customer projects were hosted in such regions, up from 16% in 2024. Our target is to reach 60% by 2031.

This is the lever with the most direct impact on both Upsun’s and its customers’ our cloud emissions. The energy grid powering a data center is the single biggest variable in a cloud deployment's carbon footprint, and we can influence that through the choices we make available to customers and the ones we steer them toward.

To support this, we already apply a 3% discount for projects hosted in greener regions. We're also redesigning our onboarding flow in 2026 to surface greener options earlier and make region migration easier. Additional product-level initiatives are planned for 2027.

3. Ongoing optimization: 2-4% annual emission cuts

An internal study in January 2026 found that resource-efficiency improvements can reduce cloud carbon emissions by 2-4% on average each year. Our SRE and FinOps teams are already driving this work continuously. More efficient resource usage is good for costs and good for emissions, which means this effort sustains itself.

What else contributes

Beyond cloud-specific action, we're maintaining a few corporate commitments that contribute to the broader target:

• Keeping our Paris headquarters on 100% renewable energy through our EDF energy contract.
• Deploying a new IT Equipment Purchasing and Sustainable Management Policy to reduce the environmental impact of our hardware fleet and move toward more circular practices. Our target is a 17% reduction in related carbon intensity by 2031.
• Holding business travel emissions flat at 2025 levels, even as the company grows.

What we're not claiming

We're not claiming to have solved cloud sustainability. We're not offsetting our way to net zero. We're not positioning this as leadership in the climate space. 

With three years of experience in cloud emission tracking, we know that carbon footprinting is a moving exercise requiring continuous methodological refinement. While our current modeling does not yet account for internal and external AI usage, we are committed to integrating these metrics in our measurement and revise our forecasts accordingly, as soon as our climate experts finalize a robust framework for inclusion.

What we are doing is measuring honestly, setting targets we believe we can hit, and building the internal processes and product features to make greener cloud choices more accessible to our customers. The 3% greener region discount has been live for a while. The onboarding redesign is in progress. The optimization work is ongoing. We'll report on progress annually.

Collaborating with Watershed for our next chapter 

To launch and implement our new climate plan, we are teaming up with Watershed, the globally recognized CO2 monitoring platform. We are excited to integrate our current measurement and new targets and roadmap in their tools and to tap into the technical knowledge of their climate experts to refine our current approach. By leveraging their great level of automation and AI, we aim to improve the tracking and maximize the reduction of our cloud and corporate emissions. 

A note on the current methodology

Our 2025 carbon footprint was calculated with Greenly using the GHG Protocol methodology, covering Scopes 1, 2, and 3: direct emissions from our own operations, indirect emissions from the energy we consume, and the broader value chain emissions we don't fully control but still influence, including our cloud infrastructure providers, business travel, purchased goods and services, and employee commuting. It is important to note that both internal and external AI usage has been excluded from the calculations. The 2.57 kt CO2e total reflects the full picture, with no categories excluded. Scope 3 is where most of our footprint lives, and it's also the hardest category to reduce, which is why our strategy focuses on the levers where we have the most direct influence.

Want to understand your project's carbon footprint or explore migrating to a greener region? Our team is available to help. You can also view our available regions and their energy carbon intensity on our website.