AI & Data Centres
Hey Data Centre Industry Show us Your Numbers
Earlier this year Google Deepmind announced that it had managed to create a drastic reduction of energy cost to cool data centres by 40%. Thus it is argued that this is being used to tackle climate change. Google has also been one of the companies really investing in the transition to renewable energy. On September the 19th 2019 as an example Google announced its intention to spend more than $2 billion in new renewable energy infrastructure.
Thus how we treat this question of data centres is important, but how much do we have to think about. In January 2019 the World Economic Forum wrote an article addressing the issue to give a perspective on the sense of urgency:
“Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the International Energy Agency (IEA), and Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) have concluded that room air conditioners alone — the typical window and split units used in most homes — are set to account for over 130 gigatons (GT) of CO2 emissions between now and 2050. That would account for 20–40% of the world’s remaining “carbon budget” (the most we can emit while still keeping global warming to less than 2˚C above pre-industrial levels — the goal set at the Paris Climate Conference in 2015).”
If room air conditioners have a massive emission, then it is hard to imagine the immense emissions that is occurring on the industrial scale. However the article suggest to solve the problem with R&D as well as increasing the optimal conditions of air conditioners to consume less energy or be more efficient etc. The article is based on a report called Solving the Global Cooling Challenge.
We could draw a similar map with increased data usage leading to increased cooling demand.
The government digital service in the United Kingdom wrote a blog post in October 2019 telling about their approach to large technology companies asking them to reveal their emission numbers. This was due to a wish to find out how much CO2 they produced, but they were denied access:
We asked our hosting providers, Amazon Web Services, UKCloud and Carrenza, to tell us how much electricity we use, and how much CO2 we produce. Only one of our providers, UKCloud, agreed to give us data about our electricity usage. For Amazon and Carrenza, we made a guess about the amount of electricity we use, assuming a percentage of our monthly bill. In addition, neither Amazon nor Google currently shares information about how much CO2 their data centres produce.
They mentioned three things for the government to do:
- Reduce the electricity we need to run our services — for example, by making our digital services more efficient
- Keep asking our providers for better data to help us develop guidance on the most sustainable data centres by region and country
- Update the Service Manual’s guidance — ‘Deciding how to host your service’ — based on what we learn
It is surely possible to do this in several governments, a start would be to know. I think it is highly likely that the technology companies do not know themselves, because they have to track all units and the energy cost relating to expenses.
Oatly which is a brand using oatdrink to replace milk recently had a striking campaign.
How can we know the amount reduce when we do not know an accurate number in the first place?
Perhaps it is time to say: hey data centre industry, show us your numbers.
When we increasingly start implementing machine learning techniques it is important that we think supply chain sustainability. Anything else would be irresponsible. We can reduce, reuse, recycle — however we need to know which actors that supplies storage that are responsible or not (hint: don’t choose Amazon).
This is #500daysofAI and you are reading article 173. I write one new article about or related to artificial intelligence every day for 500 days.
