clean by the same accident that makes it sovereign.
Keeping your work in France didn't only keep it out of foreign reach — it put it on one of the lowest-carbon grids in Europe. The low footprint isn't a separate green campaign; it's a byproduct of the sovereign architecture.
measured, to a government standard.
These are the figures behind the footprint — drawn from Scaleway's public documentation and its Environmental Impact reporting for the French availability zones MakeMode runs in.
The ~0.065 figure is specific to those French availability zones, not a blanket number for Scaleway's whole fleet — which is why we frame it as "roughly 10× cleaner" rather than a single headline multiplier.
the sovereign choice and the low-carbon choice are the same choice.
We didn't pick France for its carbon and Europe for its sovereignty as two separate decisions. They're a single architectural fact: the work runs on Scaleway in France, so it stays under EU jurisdiction and sits on a grid powered largely by nuclear and hydro. Move the same compute to a coal- or gas-heavy grid and you'd lose both at once.
the grid does the work
France's electricity is near-zero-carbon at the source, so every kilowatt-hour our compute draws starts roughly 10× cleaner than the EU average — before any optimisation on our side.
efficient buildings on top
That clean power runs through data centres measured to a PUE of 1.25–1.37 — meaning very little of the energy is lost to cooling and overhead rather than computation.
no GPUs of our own
Inference runs on Scaleway Generative APIs — managed, per-token, on shared infrastructure. We operate no always-on GPU fleet of our own to keep warm.
audited, not hand-waved.
The carbon isn't an estimate we made up. Today, Scaleway breaks out our footprint per model and per project — visible in the Console's Environmental Footprint dashboard, and pullable from the Environmental Impact API, which produces monthly and yearly summary reports built for CSRD reporting. So an institution that needs to account for the emissions of the software its students build can get a real, methodology-backed number — not a vendor's reassurance.
what we measure, what we estimate, what's coming.
We'd rather be precise than impressive. Here's exactly where the line sits between what is audited today and what isn't yet.
Real figures from Scaleway's Environmental Impact reporting, tagged to the MakeMode project and broken out by Generative APIs model. CSRD-oriented monthly and yearly summaries are available now.
Showing a footprint for an individual build is on the roadmap, and it will be a clearly labelled estimate — apportioning the audited monthly per-model figure by each build's share of tokens. The authoritative number stays the monthly aggregate.
For a sense of scale: in a recent month, the whole MakeMode project's footprint came to roughly 17 gCO₂e — of which AI inference was only about 4 gCO₂e, with most of the rest being always-on infrastructure like the database. These are illustrative recent figures, not guarantees — but they show how small the footprint is once the grid underneath is this clean.
putting the footprint where you can see it.
per-build estimate, in the app
A per-build carbon estimate shown alongside what you make — derived from the audited monthly per-model data, and labelled as an estimate.
reports you can hand over
Continuing to make the CSRD-oriented monthly and yearly summaries easy for an institution's sustainability team to pull and file.
a green-hours nudge — modestly
France's grid barely varies hour to hour thanks to nuclear baseload, so "build when it's greenest" would be a small, mostly-educational prompt. We'd rather mention it honestly than oversell it.
the same architecture, top to bottom.
Sovereignty, privacy, security and low carbon aren't four features — they're one decision to keep everything in Europe, on infrastructure you can audit. See the rest of how that holds together.