Greenpeace claims Apple, Amazon guilty of dirty cloud computing

Greenpeace released a report Tuesday called "How Clean is Your Cloud?" The environmental advocacy group graded 14 companies: Akami, Amazon, Apple, Dell, Facebook, Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Rackspace, Salesforce, Twitter and Yahoo.

"Amazon Web Services believes that cloud computing is inherently more environmentally friendly than traditional computing."

D in renewables

Greenpeace as well gave Apple a "D" in renewables and advocacy, transparency and energy efficiency. The computer giant scored an "F" in infrastructure siting.

Apple pushed back saying that Greenpeace's numbers were exaggerated. To illustrate, Greenpeace claims that Apple's Maiden, N.C. data center will consume 100 megawatts of energy.

Apple recently released their 2012 facilities report, which detailed improvements mentioned to the massive Maiden data center.

The report should be read with some skepticism

While the report should be read with some skepticism, it raises excellent questions. As our data increasingly moves to the cloud, how can we measure the environmental impact of the data centers that are essential to future of research?