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According to figures certified by the China Environmental United Certification Center (CEC), Ant Group has once again achieved operational carbon neutrality (Scope 1 & 2) for the second consecutive year. It follows the company’s initial achievement in 2021. This marks another concrete step for Ant Group towards fulfilling its pledge made in March 2021 to achieve net zero carbon emissions across Scope 1, 2 & 3 by 2030.

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol (Protocol) classifies a company’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG) into Scope 1, 2 and 3. Based on the Protocol, Ant Group, in its Carbon Neutrality Road Map, defined its GHG emissions scopes as follows:

• Scope 1. Direct and fugitive emissions from the combustion of fossil fuel by the company’s owned or controlled sources.
• Scope 2. Indirect emissions from the consumption of purchased energy, such as heating or cooling networks.
• Scope 3. Indirect emissions that occur in the company’s value chain. These include emissions from the use of leased data centres, employees’ business travel and their daily commute.

Reducing Carbon Emissions Even More

According to CEC-certified figures, in 2022, after reductions and substitutions, Ant Group’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for Scope 1 & 2 totalled 21,087.93 tonnes of CO2e. These were fully offset by the company’s purchase of carbon credits from a Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) Project. This project was the CECIC Gansu Yumen Changma No.3 Wind Farm Project (VCS Project No.728).

CEC-certified figures indicate that Ant Group reduced a total of 68,665.35 tonnes of CO₂e across Scope 1, 2 & 3 in 2022. That is up 81% from 37,909.87 tonnes in 2021. This is equivalent to taking more than 28,000 cars off the road each year, assuming each car is driven 12,000 kilometres per year at 0.203 kilogram of CO₂e per kilometre. The CEC was an official service provider to the 2022 Winter Olympics. As a service provider, it helped the Olympic Committee measure the effectiveness of its carbon reduction efforts.

Leveraging Green Technologies for the Greater Good

This reduction was mainly due to the implementation of green computing technologies. These technologies reduced about 62,000 tonnes of CO₂e, which accounted for more than 99% of all carbon emissions reduced in Scope 3 during 2022. This was a 110% improvement over the 30,000 tonnes of CO₂e that green computing technologies reduced in 2021.

“At Ant Group, we believe a company’s commercial value creation should go hand in hand with social value creation,“ said Yijie Peng, Chief Sustainability Officer at Ant Group. “Technological innovations have always been an important pathway for us to achieve this goal. We are committed to reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2030. We will continue to explore innovative ways to help reduce our carbon footprint and that of the industry.”

Ant Group has been developing and adopting green computing technologies since 2019. These technologies include Green AI (Artificial Intelligence), a series of technologies such as elastic management, GPU memory pooling and virtualisation. This makes large-scale model training more efficient.

Green Tech at Work

Take, for example, ATorch, Ant Group’s PyTorch extension library. It can double the utilisation rate of AI computing power in large GPU cluster configurations as compared to Megatron-DeepSpeed. The use of ATorch has led to energy efficiency gains and carbon emission reductions for AI model training operations. The company uses these operations to iterate its AI-based products and services for better customer experience.

Ant Group also uses other green computing technologies. These include online-offline hybrid deployment, cloud-native time-shared scheduling, AI-based auto-scaling and OceanBase enterprise-level distributed relational database. These help improve the energy efficiency of data centres.

In 2022, Ant Group joined the Low Carbon Patent Pledge and granted free patent access to its green computing technologies.

The CEC’s carbon neutrality certificate for Ant Group for the year 2022 is publicly available on the Information Platform for Carbon Neutrality. It is affiliated with the Environmental Development Center of China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment.

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