As the tech sector creates data at greater rates than ever before, using more cloud and on premise workloads, it’s more important than ever that firms consider their sustainability strategy and carbon footprint.
Until the world has achieved net zero energy, every watt that goes into powering hardware and software adds to overall global emissions, with data center growth accounting for more and more global energy demand. Renewable energy and greater efficiency help with this but are not silver bullets.
Breakthroughs in AI and quantum computing have put extra strain on data centers and thrown a spanner in the works when it comes to improvements in energy efficiency across the sector.
In this episode, Jane and Rory discuss what the tech sector is doing to counteract this and whether the benefits of this new era can outweigh its carbon cost.
Highlights
“When we look at this, in the perspective of everything else that is being spoken about, we're supposed to be trying to reduce energy consumption in an effort to reduce emissions but at the same time, everything is pointing us towards a greater use of energy.”
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“When we talk about data center efficiency, one of the number one concepts there is green data centers. These are data centers with improved energy efficiency and lower carbon emissions through a number of different mechanisms. The number one way of doing that, and we'll get on to this in a minute, is investing heavily in clean energy generation. If your energy has been generated with as few carbon emissions as possible, then you can feel better about using it however you want to.”
“In my opinion, it's very much the nature of these companies to be run often by accelerationists, who just want to kind of go headlong towards general AI, so human-level intelligence AI that you can apply to anything. They're not futurists, but they're very kind of future-focused and excited by future technology. And one of the ways that this manifests itself is that they're not so interested in the green energy technologies that exist already.”
Footnotes
- What is a green data center and why are they attracting big investment?
- How will energy prices affect data center costs in 2024 and beyond?
- “We’ve made savings of around 85%”: Embracing green energy for data centers by migrating to Iceland
- Microsoft just signed the biggest corporate renewable energy deal ever — and it's all to keep up with soaring AI data center power demands
- Global power shortages mean data centers could struggle to shoulder the burden of energy-intensive generative AI demands in 2024
- Westcon-Comstor hits 100% renewable electricity target in the UK
- Cisco plans to power 100% of its operations in Europe with renewables - but there’s a catch
- Huawei emphasizes energy efficiency, storage at IDI 2024 Berlin as firm looks to address AI data boom
- A super-supergrid? CEO of UK power network says legacy infrastructure requires major overhaul to meet soaring data center energy demands
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