#29 of 30 · GPU cloud
Lambda
Tens of thousands of GPUs for Microsoft and NVIDIA; not one environmental number.
In plain words
How scores workLambda scores 32 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
- Carbon · No renewable procurement or inventory disclosed; Kansas City sits on Evergy's coal-and-gas-heavy grid.
- Water · No water data; mix of leased colocation and a retrofitted 2009 facility.
- Transparency · No environmental disclosure of any kind in funding materials or on its site.
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
Lambda rents NVIDIA GPUs to AI labs and, since November 2025, to Microsoft under a multibillion-dollar deal; it leased about 18,000 GPUs to NVIDIA itself, raised $1.5 billion in a Series E and $1 billion of debt to buy more, and is converting a former bank data centre in Kansas City into a 24 MW site for 10,000-plus Blackwell Ultra GPUs. It publishes no emissions, energy, water or hardware data and has no climate targets.
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
Lambda rents GPUs to labs and to Microsoft for frontier workloads; Epoch's 0.3 Wh for a typical frontier query is the representative figure. 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 × 0.4 L/kWh (estimated WUE for leased colocation and a retrofitted site). 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
78 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
$1.5bn of equity and $1bn of debt earmarked for GPUs, plus a new 24 MW site, roughly double the fleet in a year.
How we got this number
No disclosure. Leased colocation in California and Texas plus a retrofitted Kansas City building; 0.4 L/kWh is a mid-range assumption.
How we got this number
The US grid is about 40% non-fossil; Lambda discloses no renewable purchases.
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
About 18,000 GPUs leased to NVIDIA, 'tens of thousands' committed to Microsoft, and 10,000+ Blackwell Ultra GPUs planned for Kansas City, funded by a $1.5bn Series E and $1bn of debt. ±2×.
Megawatts the AI fleet pulls. One megawatt runs roughly 750 US homes.
How we got this number
60,000 accelerators × 1.3 kW each, all-in. Fleet power implied by the chip count.
Terawatt-hours per year. One TWh is a year of electricity for about 95,000 US homes.
How we got this number
78 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
60,000 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
60,000 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
78 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
78 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
- Blackwell Ultra clusters; no workload-level data published. Data Center Dynamics
- No renewable procurement or inventory disclosed; Kansas City sits on Evergy's coal-and-gas-heavy grid. Data Center Dynamics
- No water data; mix of leased colocation and a retrofitted 2009 facility. Data Center Dynamics
- No environmental disclosure of any kind in funding materials or on its site. Data Center Dynamics
- No targets. Data Center Dynamics
- No enforcement actions; reuses an idle 2009-era data centre in Kansas City rather than building greenfield. Data Center Dynamics
Models
What this company ships, and what each prompt costs
No model-level entries — this company hosts or supplies others rather than serving its own models.
Where the compute lives
Named sites from company disclosures and press reporting
- San Francisco HQCalifornia, USA
- LAX01 (Prime)El Segundo, California, USA
- Kansas CityMissouri, USA · 24 MW retrofit; 10,000+ Blackwell Ultra.