Last week, western America witnessed an unprecedented heat wave. It is a poignant reminder of the fact that the climate is warming and our carbon footprint needs to reduce.
How does the cloud fit into that?
Computers emit heat as a by-product of their operation. Large data centers place huge demands on the grid for their cooling needs, which increases the carbon footprint. This demand is going to exponentially grow as the digital economy expands.
Cloud computing helps our decarbonization efforts in two ways.
Decarbonizing of computing:
Between 2010 and 2018 the amount of computing done in data centers increased by about 550%. But the amount of electricity consumed increased only 6%. I believe that in the coming decade, with the large-scale adoption of cloud computing, the total carbon footprint of computing services will actually reduce. The cloud providers are innovating to first, produce less heat and second, to make the cooling process more sustainable. For example:
Energy efficient Processing Units: Google Cloud Tensor Processing Unit (TPUs) (highly efficient compute chips to run machine learning applications) are designed with energy efficiency in mind, specifically to accelerate deep learning workloads at higher teraflops per watt compared to general purpose processors.
Innovative cooling techniques: Microsoft’s project Natick is experimenting with underwater servers to reduce the cooling needs. Initial results show a hardware failure rate of 1/8th that of a land based control group.
Decarbonizing by computing:
The cloud is – and will continue to transform our business to make it more sustainable.
Using data and AI/ML to reduce waste: It is well known by now that the use of AI/ML have driven efficiency across various industries. For example, predicting demand more accurately drives supply chain efficiency among retailers, causing their carbon footprint to to reduce.
What caught my attention recently is the swiss agritech startup Gamaya. It uses cloud computing to capture light waves by deploying hyperspectral imaging. The technology was originally developed by NASA. Healthy plants reflect light differently than deceased ones. By capturing the last nuance of light, Gamaya develops granular diagnostic heat maps from Brazil to India. This data (and the algorithms built on top of it) has the potential to transform agriculture and make it more sustainable.
To put things in perspective, agriculture is responsible for roughly one quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions.
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