Cloud PUE: Comparing AWS, Azure and GCP Global Regions
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In December 2024 Amazon released Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) data for many of their AWS cloud regions, and along with existing data from Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, there is finally enough data to make some comparisons for regions spread around the world and see what changed from 2022 to 2023.
PUE is a measure of how efficiently a data center uses energy. In addition to the energy that the computers themselves use, there is energy needed to cool the data center, and losses in the transmission and conversion of electricity on its way to the computers. Energy is measured (and paid for) at the meter as it enters the building, and a PUE of 1.15 means that an extra 15% of the total energy used by the computers is used for cooling and overheads. PUE varies between about 1.04 and 2.0 in practice.
All the cloud providers run very efficient data center hardware configurations, and they have, in general, become more efficient over time. However, it is harder to cool data centers in warm and humid environments, so PUE for data centers in the tropics will tend to be at the high end of the range, and PUE for data centers in cold and dry parts of the world are at the low end of the range.
