BAUXITENETWORKS

Carbon Tracking & Green Routing

Bauxite Enterprise provides real-time visibility into the environmental impact of your AI operations. By combining hardware telemetry with regional grid data, Bauxite allows you to monitor, report, and optimize the carbon footprint of every LLM request.

The “Green AI” Challenge

LLM inference is energy-intensive. A single complex query can consume as much electricity as charging a smartphone. In a global deployment, the Carbon Intensity of that energy varies significantly depending on whether the data center is powered by coal, gas, or renewables.

How It Works

Bauxite calculates emissions using a multi-factor model that integrates with your inference fleet:

1. Energy Estimation

Bauxite tracks the duration and token count of each request. For self-hosted vLLM clusters, it can ingest GPU power metrics (TDP/Watts) to calculate actual Kilowatt-hours (kWh) consumed per prompt.

2. Grid Intensity Integration

Bauxite maps your vllm-prod endpoints to geographic regions (e.g., us-east-1 vs. eu-west-1) and pulls real-time Grid Carbon Intensity (gCO2eq/kWh) from providers like Electricity Maps or Cloud provider sustainability APIs.

3. Green Routing (Beta)

When multiple clusters are available, Bauxite can be configured to favor “Green Regions” during periods of high renewable energy availability, provided latency requirements are met.

Configuration

Enable carbon tracking in your enterprise.yaml:

enterprise:
  carbon_tracking:
    enabled: true
    provider: "google_cloud" # or "aws", "electricity_maps"
    reporting_interval: "1h"
    
  green_routing:
    enabled: true
    priority: "low_carbon" # Balanced with 'latency'
    threshold_gco2: 200    # Maximum carbon intensity allowed

Reporting & Dashboards

Bauxite exports carbon metrics directly to Prometheus/Grafana, allowing you to build sustainability dashboards that show:

  • Total CO2e: Cumulative emissions across all LLM providers.
  • Carbon per Department: Track which internal teams are driving the highest emissions.
  • Efficiency Gains: Visualize how KV-Aware Routing reduces total compute time and associated carbon.

Example Metric

bauxite_request_carbon_grams_total{model="gpt-4o", region="us-east-1"} 1.24

Zero-Trust Compliance

In keeping with the Straitjacket model, carbon metadata is purely architectural.

No PII Leaks: Carbon reports only contain model names, token counts, and regions. Memory-Mapped: Telemetry is buffered in a fixed 2MB volatile ring buffer before being scraped, ensuring it never hits the disk.