Article published by Sustainability News 25 July 2024
AI’s growth brings a significant environmental impact due to the high computational power required. Data centers currently consume 1.5% of global electricity, and by 2027, the energy needed for AI servers could exceed that of small countries. This energy demand contributes to both carbon emissions and the accumulation of electronic waste from AI hardware components.
To address this, tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are powering their data centers with renewable energy to reduce their carbon footprints. Additionally, many organizations are integrating AI into their Net Zero strategies, focusing on improving efficiency, waste reduction, and demand prediction.
Sustainable AI practices are gaining importance across the ecosystem. Through collaborations between academia, industry, and policymakers, innovative solutions are being developed to ensure AI’s future growth is aligned with environmental responsibility.
Powering the machine
Amid growing apprehensions about AI’s environmental impact, industry stakeholders are increasingly focusing on enhancing energy efficiency and mitigating carbon emissions. Innovations in AI hardware design, including the development of low-power processors and energy-efficient architectures, aim to optimize performance while minimizing energy consumption.
Fredrik Jansson, chief strategy and marketing officer, atNorth, explained how the location of datacentres will have a profound impact on their sustainable credentials:
“AI requires a significant investment in digital infrastructure to allow for the storage and almost instantaneous processing of vast amounts of data. Datacentres that accommodate these workloads require significant cooling systems that use a huge amount of energy at a considerable environmental and financial cost.
“It might seem that businesses have an almost impossible task to balance the need for the best possible infrastructure in the right location to support digitization and drive increasingly critical sustainability initiatives. Yet there is a solution that lies with the choice of datacentre.
Jansson concluded: “Datacentre located in regions with a consistent cool climate and a surplus of renewable energy sources can offer a stable long term power supply that is significantly cheaper compared to its natural gas counterparts. Modern datacentres built in cooler regions such as the Nordics, utilize the climate to enable the implementation of more energy efficient infrastructure and allow for heat recovery technology that permits excess heat to be reused to heat local communities.
This relatively simple change can drive down the total cost of data ownership and will go a long way to meet business sustainability targets. By way of example, atNorth customer, Shearwater Geoservices migrated a portion of their IT workload to one of our Iceland sites resulting in a 92% reduction in CO2 output and an 85% cost saving.”
Read the whole article here