On 15 September, it was reported by The Guardian that “emissions from in-house data centres of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple may be 7.62 times higher than the official tally”.
In light of this news, Elio van Puyvelde, Chief Information Officer at Nscale, a fully vertically integrated AI cloud provider, comments on how the increase in emissions from Big Tech – that use data centres to meet their AI demands – are eye-watering.
Elio explains “The race for AI dominance is heating up, but at what cost? The increase in emissions, 7.62 times higher than initially reported by these tech giants, are largely down to legacy data centres unable to cope with the power demands of AI. And while big tech invests heavily in renewables, the sheer scale of the AI boom threatens to overwhelm those efforts.
“Big tech is in a bind, but there’s a way out. Ensuring data centres are built where there is stable supply of renewable power is one thing, but the industry must focus on maximising efficiency too. The reality is AI workloads are so often poorly optimised, wasting energy use and delivering poor returns. Accelerating AI hardware and software optimisation is one of the best routes to managing AI energy consumption levels.
“Companies must optimise and fine-tune AI models as well as invest in energy efficient AI accelerator hardware. The open source community is already hard at work finding ways to make AI models run more efficiently and with less impact on the environment. Open source innovation will drive more efficient and sustainable AI use.”
For more from Nscale, click here.
The post Data centre emissions 662% higher than initially reported appeared first on Data Centre & Network News.
On 15 September, it was reported by The Guardian that “emissions from in-house data centres of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple may be 7.62 times higher than the official tally”.
In light of this news, Elio van Puyvelde, Chief Information Officer at Nscale, a fully vertically integrated AI cloud provider, comments on how the increase in emissions from Big Tech – that use data centres to meet their AI demands – are eye-watering.
Elio explains “The race for AI dominance is heating up, but at what cost? The increase in emissions, 7.62 times higher than initially reported by these tech giants, are largely down to legacy data centres unable to cope with the power demands of AI. And while big tech invests heavily in renewables, the sheer scale of the AI boom threatens to overwhelm those efforts.
“Big tech is in a bind, but there’s a way out. Ensuring data centres are built where there is stable supply of renewable power is one thing, but the industry must focus on maximising efficiency too. The reality is AI workloads are so often poorly optimised, wasting energy use and delivering poor returns. Accelerating AI hardware and software optimisation is one of the best routes to managing AI energy consumption levels.
“Companies must optimise and fine-tune AI models as well as invest in energy efficient AI accelerator hardware. The open source community is already hard at work finding ways to make AI models run more efficiently and with less impact on the environment. Open source innovation will drive more efficient and sustainable AI use.”
For more from Nscale, click here.
The post Data centre emissions 662% higher than initially reported appeared first on Data Centre & Network News.