Explainer · 4 min read

What is AI
energy attestation?

Energy attestation is the act of signing a hardware-measured energy reading at the moment of capture and anchoring its hash on a public blockchain — so the number cannot be altered, forged or denied later.

Traditional energy reporting depends on spreadsheets and vendor dashboards. The numbers travel through human hands, are reconciled by hand, and are trusted by hand. An AI workload running on a GPU produces no native receipt; the operator writes one down.

Energy attestation replaces that paper trail with cryptography:

• Energy is read directly from hardware sensors — NVML for GPU, RAPL for CPU and DRAM — at sub-second resolution.
• The reading is signed with Ed25519 (and ML-DSA for post-quantum safety) while still in the workload's signing context.
• Hashes of those signed records are committed to Polygon mainnet in batched Merkle roots, where they become a public dated commitment.
• Anyone can later verify offline: signature → hash → Merkle inclusion → on-chain anchor. No call to Serial Alice required.

Why this matters now

Three regulatory waves arrive simultaneously:

• CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive) — energy data must be auditable, not just declared. Applies to large EU companies and listed SMEs, phased through 2028.
• EU AI Act — Article 51 — high-risk AI systems must publish computational power and energy consumption used during training. Spreadsheet attestation will not survive enforcement.
• GHG Protocol Scope 3 — emissions inherited from suppliers require provable data. Most suppliers cannot prove energy use to a regulator.

What it is not

Energy attestation is not monitoring. Monitoring is a dashboard. Attestation is a signed record that can be verified by a stranger, in another jurisdiction, ten years from now — without any access to the original system.

It is not carbon accounting either. Carbon accounting takes an energy number and multiplies it by a grid factor. Attestation is upstream of that: it provides the energy number whose carbon claims will be derived.

What gets signed

The canonical payload of an attestation includes:

Every field is part of the SHA-256 canonical hash. Changing any value invalidates the signature, which invalidates the Merkle leaf, which invalidates the on-chain anchor. The proof is structurally indivisible.