Methodology
How Promise vs. Footprint converts megawatt-hours and metric tonnes into a unit a US reader can feel.
The baseline: 2024 US suburban household
Every footprint number on this site is also expressed in “households equivalent” — how many US suburban households would consume the same amount of electricity, water, or carbon in a year. The baseline values are:
| Resource | Per household / year | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Electricity | 10,500 kWh | EIA Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) + 2024 retail electricity sales data |
| Water | 109,500 gal | USGS Water Use + EPA WaterSense indoor/outdoor estimates (≈300 gal/day) |
| Carbon (CO₂e) | 16 tonnes | EPA Household Carbon Footprint Calculator + EIA 2024 residential blended figures |
Why 2024 US suburban specifically
The platform's primary audience is in the United States, and almost all the data-center build-out being measured here is on US soil. Holding the baseline at “US suburban 2024” means the household-equivalent number reflects what the comparison is actually asking: how many households' worth of grid capacity, water, and carbon does this AI infrastructure pull, on the system that's actually feeding it. Global median consumption would be a different baseline producing a much larger comparison number; we've chosen the more conservative one.
The choice is itself a tracked assumption. If the EIA's next RECS revises the household electricity figure, every conversion on the site updates from one source-of-truth in /promise-vs-footprint/methodology.
Conversion math
For a data center with continuous power draw P in megawatts:
annual energy (kWh) = P × 1000 × 24 × 365 households-equivalent = annual energy ÷ 10,500
A 100 MW data center running at 100% utilization = 876 GWh/year = ~83,400 US suburban households worth of grid electricity.
Why self-disclosure only
Each pair uses ONLY the company's own published documents on both sides — the promise quoted from a CEO speech / blog post / earnings call, and the footprint quoted from the same company's sustainability report or SEC filing. Third-party criticism is plentiful but dismissible. A company's own annual report disclosing emissions are up is the strongest possible evidence, and it's the company's own framing of those numbers we're holding against its own promises.
Independent verification
Each row's promise URL and footprint URL is independently cross-checked by an LLM that did not extract the original fact (Gemini, verifying DeepSeek-extracted text). When the verifier confirms the source actually contains the quoted text, the row gets a ✓ verified stamp. When it disagrees, the row gets a ⚠ flagged stamp and routes to a human-review queue. See /healthz._debug.factVerification for verifier health.