Embodied Carbon Disclosure

Overview

Embodied Carbon Disclosure is a sustainability specification developed by the Open Compute Project in collaboration with iMason and other industry partners. It defines a standardized methodology for hardware vendors to calculate and report the embodied carbon (also called Scope 3 upstream emissions) in their products — covering manufacturing, materials, and supply chain impacts rather than operational energy consumption.

The specification addresses a key challenge in data center sustainability accounting: without a common reporting framework, embodied carbon figures from different vendors are not comparable, making it impossible for operators to make informed procurement decisions based on lifecycle emissions. The OCP Embodied Carbon Disclosure spec provides a standard stack-up methodology so that all vendors report using the same boundaries, allocation rules, and calculation approaches.

The framework enables cascaded carbon accounting: component-level disclosures roll up into server-level figures, which in turn enable product-level and company-level emissions forecasting. The specification is live on the OCP portal as of October 2025.