Cloud Computing for Sustainable Practices

𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝗵𝗶𝗴𝗵𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁𝘀 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗹𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗯𝗼𝗻, 𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗴𝘆, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘄𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗼𝗼𝘁𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗻𝘁𝘀 — 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗰𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗹𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗴𝗿𝗮𝘃𝗲. A new paper Nature Magazine from Microsoft researchers, (led by Husam Alissa and Teresa Nick), demonstrates the power of life cycle assessment (#LCA) to guide more sustainable data center design decisions — going beyond operational efficiency. 𝐊𝐞𝐲 𝐌𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐚𝐠𝐞:  While LCAs are often conducted after design and construction, this paper highlights the value of applying them much earlier. Integrated into early-stage design, LCAs help balance sustainability alongside feasibility and cost — leading to better trade-offs from the start. For example, the study found that switching from air cooling to cold plates that cool datacenter chips more directly – a newer technology that Microsoft is deploying in its datacenters – could: ▶️reduce GHG emissions and energy demand by ~15 % and ▶️reduce water consumption by ~30-50 % across the datacenters’ entire life spans. And this goes beyond cooling water. It includes water used in power generation, manufacturing, and across the entire value chain. As lead author Husam Alissa notes: "𝘞𝘦’𝘳𝘦 𝘢𝘥𝘷𝘰𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦 𝘤𝘺𝘤𝘭𝘦 𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘰𝘰𝘭𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘨𝘶𝘪𝘥𝘦 𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘥𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘭𝘺 𝘰𝘯 — 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮 𝘸𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘵𝘰 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘢𝘥𝘰𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘪𝘦𝘳." To support broader adoption, the team is making the methodology open and available to the industry via an open research repository: https://lnkd.in/gC5jdkMs The work builds on Microsoft’s continued efforts to construct unified life cycle assessment methods and tools for cloud providers. (read more about this here: https://lnkd.in/gq24wMrA) 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝘂𝗹𝗹 𝗽𝗮𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲: 👉https://lnkd.in/gVm25zzh #sustainability #climateaction #innovation #sciencetoaction

Headline: China Sinks Data Centers into the Ocean to Tackle AI Cooling Crisis ⸻ Introduction: To support its aggressive push into artificial intelligence and cloud computing, China is rapidly expanding its data center infrastructure. But this expansion poses a growing challenge: how to cool vast server farms without depleting precious water supplies. In a bold and innovative move, China is deploying data centers underwater, turning to the ocean as a sustainable cooling solution—and in doing so, it may be outpacing the rest of the world. ⸻ Key Details: 1. AI Demands Fuel Data Center Growth • China’s economic strategy prioritizes AI, digital infrastructure, and cloud computing as critical engines of future growth. • These technologies depend on high-performance data centers, which consume massive energy and water resources for cooling. 2. Water Scarcity vs. Data Center Demand • Traditional land-based data centers use hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per day to dissipate heat. • Many are located in arid regions like Arizona, Spain, and parts of the Middle East due to their low humidity, despite water scarcity in these areas. • As these centers proliferate, they compete directly with agriculture and human consumption, prompting sustainability concerns. 3. China’s Ocean-Based Solution • In response to the growing water challenge, China is leading the deployment of underwater data centers, placing them offshore to utilize natural ocean cooling. • This method drastically reduces water usage and energy costs while avoiding the land-use conflicts associated with traditional facilities. • China’s efforts appear to be ahead of other nations, which have only experimented with submerged servers on a limited scale. 4. Environmental and Strategic Implications • Underwater data centers may reduce carbon footprints and eliminate the need for massive evaporative cooling systems. • However, there are questions about long-term maintenance, ecological impact, and geopolitical access to maritime infrastructure. • The shift could reinforce China’s position in the global AI arms race by improving data center efficiency and reducing operational constraints. ⸻ Why It Matters: As AI continues to drive demand for computing power, the environmental costs of data centers—especially water usage—are becoming unsustainable. China’s underwater strategy not only offers a bold path to sustainability but also serves as a geopolitical differentiator in the digital era. If successful at scale, ocean-based data centers could reshape the future of computing infrastructure worldwide, offering a cleaner, cooler alternative to traditional server farms on land. https://lnkd.in/gEmHdXZy

I came across an interesting website : electricitymaps.com - this gives you an idea about Carbon Intensity for a region for different times of a day. Now - here is an interesting way I imagine this can be useful. If you work on Distributed Systems and batch scheduling on Cloud / On Premise, you can time your batch jobs to slash both carbon emissions and costs! You can use information from this website to schedule batch jobs (provided they still adhere to the SLAs) Let's take California's data as an example. Electricity Maps shows a dramatic drop in Carbon Intensity (CI) on weekdays from 10 pm to 6 am. This is because the state relies heavily on renewables like solar during the day. At night, the grid uses cleaner sources like hydropower, leading to a 50% lower CI compared to peak hours. Imagine a company needs to process a large dataset every night to generate reports. Traditionally, they might run the job at 8 pm, prioritizing speed. However, by scheduling the job for 11 pm, they can leverage California's lower CI window. This reduces their carbon footprint while still meeting the morning deadline! Here's the exciting part: Lower CI often translates to lower energy costs from cloud providers. So, you're not just helping the planet - you're potentially saving money too! I wonder if any schedulers out there can leverage this data to have carbon efficient scheduling 💪 #SustainableCloud #CloudOptimization #TechForGood

Transforming Sustainability Performance Management: EY and Microsoft Lead the Way 🌍 In today’s world, sustainability is is redefining and shaping innovative solutions to drive real, demonstrable impact. I’m excited to share how EY, in collaboration with Microsoft, is at the forefront of this transformation. The Challenge: Organizations worldwide are struggling with the complexities of sustainability, from financial tradeoffs tied to decarb + net zero commitments, carbon accounting to ESG reporting. The demand for robust, transparent, and scalable solutions has never been more urgent. The Solution: EY and Microsoft have developed a sustainability solution that leverages the power of technology to simplify and elevate sustainability efforts - the Net Zero Transformation platform built on MSM. By integrating advanced data analytics, AI, and cloud capabilities, this solution provides a comprehensive approach to managing and reporting sustainability metrics. Key Highlights: - Advanced Data Analytics: Utilizing Microsoft’s Azure platform, the solution delivers real-time insights and analytics, empowering organizations to make informed decisions that drive sustainable outcomes. - AI-Powered Reporting: AI simplifies complex data sets, generating clear and actionable reports that adhere to global sustainability standards. - Scalability: Built on the robust Microsoft Cloud, the solution is scalable, ensuring businesses of all sizes can harness its capabilities. Impact: This collaboration isn’t just about technology; it’s about driving tangible, real-world impact. By enabling enhanced visibility and control over sustainability metrics, organizations can significantly reduce their carbon footprint, improve ESG performance, and contribute to a more sustainable future. Looking Ahead: As we continue to innovate and push the boundaries of what’s possible, I’m proud of the progress we’ve made with Microsoft in this critical area. This solution underscores our commitment to sustainability and our belief that technology can be a powerful catalyst for positive change. Join us in this journey towards a more sustainable world. Together, we can make a difference. Learn more here - https://lnkd.in/eFTwGbVv In this article with Jim Little and Hanne Jesca Bax, we share more about the client story and use case. #Sustainability #Innovation #TechForGood

⛅ The Cloud Analogy Series - Part 16: Let's talk about the concept of 'Green Computing' on AWS in the same way we'd think about powering a concert! You and your friends are at a music festival. The festival is huge and will need power for lights, sound systems, and food stalls. Traditionally, they might use big, noisy generators that burn a lot of fuel and create pollution. But what if instead, they could use cleaner, more efficient sources like solar panels or wind turbines? This is much better for the environment, and in the long run, can be more cost-effective and sustainable. Green computing is a lot like switching from those noisy, polluting generators to cleaner energy sources, but for computers and internet services. In green computing on AWS: 💚 Efficient Use of Resources: AWS uses technology to make sure that these computer resources are used as efficiently as possible. It's like making sure every bit of energy from your solar panels or wind turbines is used wisely, without waste. ⚡ Renewable Energy: AWS aims to power these computers with renewable energy sources, like wind or solar power, instead of traditional, polluting energy sources. This reduces the carbon footprint, which is the total amount of greenhouse gases produced. 💡 Reducing Electronic Waste: Just like you'd want to reduce waste at your festival by recycling and reusing materials, AWS tries to minimize electronic waste. They do this by efficiently using hardware and recycling it responsibly. 🏢 Data Centers Efficiency: AWS has special buildings called data centers where all these computers are kept. These buildings are designed to be as energy-efficient as possible, using advanced cooling and design techniques to reduce energy consumption. 🏗 Innovation for Sustainability: AWS continually innovates and invests in new technologies to make their services more sustainable and less harmful to the environment. We even have a 16th leadership principle that encourages all employees to make big decisions with sustainability in mind. Learn more about green computing and about a tool you can use with your customers to help them identify their carbon footprint. Check it out: https://lnkd.in/g3ehPkqc #aws #cloudcomputing #awscloud

As #datacenters scale rapidly to support #AI, cloud computing, and other digital services, much has been written about whether existing grids can meet the surge in electricity demand—and whether emissions will spike, since most grids remain carbon intensive. This outlook - focusing on the risks and challenges of data center growth - misses the transformative role that data centers and technology companies could play in accelerating national and regional energy, climate, and sustainable development goals. In our new blog, Perrine Toledano, Bradford M. Willis and I explain how #hyperscalers can help resolve the very constraints that are slowing the energy transition and undermining broader climate and development goals. Specifically, hyperscalers can uniquely: 🔹 reduce investment risks and marginal costs for new clean grid infrastructure, as large, predictable off-takers 🔹 create financeable demand for large-scale energy storage. Storage integration - which strengthens grid reliability and resilience - has been hard to finance because of uncertain revenue streams. 🔹 expand access to water and thermal systems through shared-use infrastructure platforms, learning from successful models in other sectors like mining 🔹 deploy rapidly-evolving AI and digital tools to increase energy efficiency, manage energy demand, streamline interconnection, lower system costs, and optimize maintenance, among other evolving functions, and 🔹 expand access to broadband and digital services, closing the persistent digital divide, and bringing transformative benefits in health, education, agriculture, and financial inclusion to underserved communities. These benefits are happening already in ad hoc ways - but could be massively scaled when embedded in strategic policy frameworks and coordinated with public and private partners. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/ea6vMMaG Side note: our current focus on carbon footprinting has distracted from—rather than supported—tech firms’ transformative potential. While footprinting can provide a useful snapshot of emissions/exposure/influence, our over-emphasis on emissions reporting has crowded out any discussion of strategic systemic integration and even creates perverse incentives. The over-reliance on footprinting as the key metric has also very predictably led to myriad illegitimate practices, including 'offsetting' emissions with unbundled RECs or dubious carbon credits, and other accounting loopholes (see yet another timely, insightful article from Simon Mundy on big tech's climate claims: https://lnkd.in/eNvtGxGu). Let's shift the focus to encouraging tech firms to engage in strategic public/private cooperation in grid design and expansion, financing solutions, and expanded digital inclusion -- optimizing transformative digital innovations for societal and planetary benefit.

The Hidden Infrastructure Challenge of AI: Why Amazon's Water Strategy Matters More Than You Think As we witness the explosive growth of AI and cloud computing, there's a critical conversation happening behind the scenes that every tech leader should understand: resource sustainability at scale. Amazon's expansion of recycled water usage across 120+ data centers isn't just an environmental PR move—it's a strategic response to one of the most pressing infrastructure challenges of our time. With AI workloads driving unprecedented demand for computational power, the traditional approach to data center cooling is becoming unsustainable. The numbers tell the story: 530 million gallons of drinking water conserved annually. That's not just impressive—it's necessary. As someone who's spent years building ecommerce infrastructure, I've seen firsthand how exponential growth in digital services translates to exponential resource demands. Here's what this move signals for the industry: Resource efficiency is becoming competitive advantage. Companies that solve for sustainability early will have operational resilience as regulations tighten and resources become scarcer. Infrastructure innovation drives business innovation. When you're forced to optimize at the hardware level, you often discover software efficiencies you never knew existed. Water scarcity is the next supply chain risk. Just as we learned to diversify chip suppliers, we need to diversify and optimize resource consumption patterns. The broader lesson? In the age of AI, the companies that win won't just be those with the best algorithms—they'll be those with the most sustainable infrastructure to run them at scale. Every CTO planning AI implementations should be asking: "What's our resource optimization strategy?" Because in a world where every major tech company is competing for the same finite cooling resources, efficiency isn't just good citizenship—it's good business. The future of tech isn't just about what we build, but how sustainably we can build it. What resource challenges are you seeing in your infrastructure planning? #TechLeadership #Sustainability #AI #DataCenters #Ecommerce #CloudComputing

I am often asked to share customer success stories and enjoy doing so. However, the ones that I like and that I share have to include actual details, not just generalities! Today's story has tons of details. A few years ago #AWS customer New Relic decided to completely exist their on-premises data centers by migrating to the AWS cloud. This move was driven by several factors including aggressive sustainability goals and a desire for better scalability & efficiency. After an initial migration to a fleet of over 23,000 AWS Graviton servers in 2022, they continue to optimize and to adopt newer instance types. Today, with about 64% of their workloads migrated, they have reduced their carbon emissions by 99.45% and the total amount of compute (measured in Normalized Instance Hours, or NIH) by 27.29%. Read the entire blog post, "New Relic powers sustainable observability with AWS" at https://lnkd.in/grWXEEAQ

While many raise concerns about the energy needed to power cloud and AI infrastructures, data centers may play a critical role in reducing our emissions. In New York, utility provider Con Edison is planning to capture wasted heat from data centers to power a nearby affordable housing complex. Burning fossil fuels for buildings is the state’s largest source of emissions. By capturing what was once wasted energy into a sustainable resource, it can help power our cities and drive meaningful environmental change. I'm hopeful that if this pilot is successful, we can further reduce our global carbon footprint by tapping into data centers around the world. https://lnkd.in/gmB_BAF7

Schneider Electric CIO Elizabeth Hackenson's new blog focuses on using our own solutions to run IT infrastructure assets more efficiently and accelerate the move to the cloud as part of an integrated sustainable Green IT strategy. It highlights how EcoStruxure IT optimizes IT infrastructure management, leveraging IoT-enabled hardware, software, and services to offer real-time data insights, proactive monitoring, and remote management capabilities for critical IT environments. And it shares some impressive stats about EcoStruxure IT and how we help our customers including: “Since 2018, Schneider Electric’s solutions, including EcoStruxure IT, have helped our customers save and avoid 513 million Tonnes of CO2 emissions. That’s equivalent to the average annual emissions of almost 18K commercial airliners!” “In our Boston, MA, headquarters, the energy emissions from IT operations experienced an 11% reduction last month compared to the 2022-2023 average monthly emissions.” “Our Lexington Smart Factory site located in Kentucky (USA) achieved an impressive reduction of 34% within the same timeframe and scope.” A great read!