Google de Alphabet Inc. It will inform its cloud customers of carbon emissions from their use and open up satellite images of these first-time subscribers for environmental analysis, as part of a push to help companies track and reduce carbon budgets.
New features are among the announcements that Google Cloud Tuesday to kick off the annual customer conference, which is taking place roughly this year due to the pandemic.
Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.com, the leading cloud service providers in the West, have been competing in sustainability offerings for years.
Its goal is to serve companies that are under pressure from stakeholders to rethink their operations in light of climate change.
Google’s new carbon-footprint reporting tool, similar to the one Microsoft already offers, shows emissions associated with electricity that were used to store and process customer data.
In addition, Google will now warn customers when they waste energy on idle cloud services.
The new mapping view, Google Earth Engine, has been used by tens of thousands of researchers, governments, and advocacy groups since 2009. But now Google is allowing businesses to access the service, which includes many of the huge geospatial data sets like Landsat and software needed to analyze it. Amazon has a similar initiative.
“This is something we now realize applies to many of these business opportunities,” said Jane Bennett, Google Cloud CTO.
Earth Engine can help ensure the sustainability of supply chains and predict operational challenges from extreme weather conditions, according to Google.
Unilever, which has been testing the technology for the past 12 months, has examined the sources of palm oil in Indonesia, although it is not known if this has led to changes in practices.
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