#19 of 30 · AI lab
Anthropic (Claude)
A safety-first brand with no environmental report — and gigawatts on order.
In plain words
How scores workAnthropic scores 42 out of 100 — laggard. Little or no disclosure, fossil-backed capacity, or active disputes with regulators and communities. Confidence in this score is little data (D).
What helps
- Nothing on record.
What hurts
- Efficiency · No per-prompt, per-model or fleet energy data; Claude's frontier models are closed-weight so independent benchmarks cannot measure them.
- Carbon · The $50bn Fluidstack build-out was announced without naming the sites' electricity source.
- Transparency · No environmental report, no model-level disclosures, no data-centre locations beyond what partners publish.
What nobody knows
- Per-prompt energy disclosed
- Per-prompt water disclosed
- Training emissions in model cards
- Annual environmental report
- Location-based Scope 2 reported
- +3 more
Claude is trained and served on AWS Trainium (Project Rainier, ≈500,000 chips) and Google Cloud TPUs, with up to one million TPUs and 'well over a gigawatt' arriving in 2026, up to 1 GW on Azure, and $50 billion of its own data centres in Texas and New York with Fluidstack. Anthropic has published no environmental disclosure of any kind — no per-prompt figures, no training emissions, no annual inventory, no power source for the new sites — so its score borrows from its hosts' clean-energy claims and is capped by the absence of data.
Key figures
Per-prompt and fleet metrics. Hover a title for what it means; open “How we got this number” for the working.
ecogpt.co estimate; no company figure.
How we got this number
Claude's frontier models are closed and unmeasured. They are comparable in class to GPT-4o, for which Epoch independently estimates about 0.3 Wh for a typical query. Uncertainty roughly ±3×.
On-site cooling only, so comparable with Google and OpenAI's figures.
How we got this number
0.3 Wh per prompt × 0.15 L/kWh (AWS's disclosed fleet WUE, where Claude is mostly served). Counting the water evaporated to generate the electricity adds ≈0.54 mL.
Location-based: what the grid actually emitted. Renewable certificates would bring the market-based figure near zero.
How we got this number
0.3 Wh × 390 gCO₂/kWh (US grid, location-based).
Location-based estimate for the AI fleet only; not comparable with a full corporate inventory.
How we got this number
450 MW × 8,760 h × 80% utilisation × 390 gCO₂/kWh (US grid). Compute only — nothing else the company does is counted.
How we got this number
From ≈450 MW on Rainier to well over 1 GW of TPUs plus up to 1 GW on Azure during 2026 — roughly a tripling of compute, and of the emissions behind it.
How we got this number
Anthropic publishes no water data; AWS's 0.15 L/kWh applies to the Rainier capacity that serves most Claude traffic.
How we got this number
AWS and Google both match 100% of electricity annually; Anthropic has no procurement of its own and the Fluidstack sites' supply is undisclosed.
Hardware & materials
The chips, power, copper and future e-waste behind the fleet — the part sustainability reports leave out
GPUs, TPUs or custom accelerators the company runs. Analyst figures are in H100-equivalents, company figures in physical chips.
How we got this number
Plus up to one million Google TPUs ('well over a gigawatt' in 2026) and up to 1 GW of Azure GPUs contracted in late 2025.
Megawatts the AI fleet pulls. One megawatt runs roughly 750 US homes.
How we got this number
≈500,000 Trainium2 chips at about 0.9 kW each all-in. Contracts signed in late 2025 add well over 1 GW of TPUs and up to 1 GW on Azure during 2026, plus $50bn of own data centres with Fluidstack.
Terawatt-hours per year. One TWh is a year of electricity for about 95,000 US homes.
How we got this number
450 MW × 8,760 h × 80% utilisation. Compute fleet only.
CO₂e emitted making the chips and servers before they answer a single prompt.
How we got this number
500,000 accelerators × 514 kg CO₂e each (chip plus share of the host server). Emitted in manufacturing, before the first prompt is served.
Tonnes of server hardware that will be retired in three to five years.
How we got this number
500,000 accelerators × 17 kg of server hardware each. Tomorrow's e-waste unless reused; generative AI could produce 2.5 Mt of it a year by 2030.
Tonnes of copper in cabling, busbars and transformers.
How we got this number
450 MW × 27 t of copper per MW (cabling, busbars, transformers).
Diesel backup units or gas turbines at the data centres, permitted or observed.
How we got this number
450 MW ÷ 2.6 MW per generator, the average size permitted at US data centres. Permit counts are not published fleet-wide; this is the number a fleet this size normally carries.
Share of retired servers and parts given a second life.
Kilograms of antimony-equivalent, the life-cycle unit for scarce minerals consumed.
Score breakdown
Each pillar is 0–100; weights are fixed across the index
- No per-prompt, per-model or fleet energy data; Claude's frontier models are closed-weight so independent benchmarks cannot measure them. Amazon
- Compute comes from AWS (100% renewable matching, net-zero 2040) and Google Cloud (24/7 CFE goal); Anthropic itself reports nothing. AmazonAmazon
- The $50bn Fluidstack build-out was announced without naming the sites' electricity source. IndustryWeek
- Rainier sites in Indiana use outside-air cooling with AWS reporting 0.15 L/kWh; no Anthropic-specific data. Amazon
- No environmental report, no model-level disclosures, no data-centre locations beyond what partners publish. AmazonIndustryWeek
- No public climate, energy or water targets of its own. Amazon
- No environmental enforcement actions on record; its CEO co-signed the 2023 extinction-risk statement that Fortune reports both labs have since softened. Fortune
Models
What this company ships, and what each prompt costs
| Model | Weights | Energy / prompt | Water | Training CO₂e |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude (Opus / Sonnet / Haiku) Frontier (undisclosed) | Closed | 0.30 Wh Estimateecogpt.co estimate. Our own estimate from published factors. The working is shown next to the number; treat it as an order of magnitude, not a measurement. | 0.045 mL Estimateecogpt.co estimate. Our own estimate from published factors. The working is shown next to the number; treat it as an order of magnitude, not a measurement. | 10,000 t Estimateecogpt.co estimate. Our own estimate from published factors. The working is shown next to the number; treat it as an order of magnitude, not a measurement. |
Where the compute lives
Named sites from company disclosures and press reporting
- Project Rainier (AWS)Indiana, USA · ≈500,000 Trainium2 chips.
- Google Cloud TPU regionsMultiple · Up to 1M TPUs in 2026.
- Fluidstack site, TexasTexas, USA · Part of a $50bn programme; power source undisclosed.
- Fluidstack site, New YorkNew York, USA
Timeline
Incidents and developments involving this company