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Best of LinkedIn: Sustainability & Green ICT CW 02/ 03 · Best of LinkedIn: Digital Transformation & Tech

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: This episode is provided by Thomas Allgeier and Frennis, based on the most relevant LinkedIn posts about sustainability and green ICT in CWO two and O three.
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  Speaker 1: Frennis supports ICT enterprises with market and competitive intelligence, decoding green software developments, benchmarking emerging standards, tracking regulatory shifts and analyzing competitor strategies.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: So welcome back to the deep dive.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: Today, we're digging into calendar weeks two and three of twenty twenty six.
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  Speaker 1: And I have to say, looking through the posts, the whole tone, it just feels different.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: Like the industry is waking up to a really loud alarm clock.
• 0:38
  Speaker 0: That is a perfect way to put it.
• 0:39
  Speaker 0: Yeah.
• 0:39
  Speaker 0: You know, for so long, sustainability in tech felt like, like a separate department, right?
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  Speaker 1: Quotely siloed.
• 0:45
  Speaker 0: Exactly.
• 0:46
  Speaker 0: You had your core strategy and then, you know, once a year, you put out the sustainability report.
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  Speaker 0: But what we're seeing now.
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  Speaker 0: It feels like those two worlds have just slammed into each other.
• 0:54
  Speaker 0: Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: it doesn't feel like we're just talking about compliance anymore.
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  Speaker 0: Not at all.
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  Speaker 0: I mean, this isn't about recycling bins or, you know, printing double-sided.
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  Speaker 0: We are talking about the fundamental architecture of our digital world.
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  Speaker 1: And the physical survival of it.
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  Speaker 0: Yes.
• 1:06
  Speaker 0: Yeah.
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  Speaker 0: It's a head-on collision between this massive exponential energy appetite of AI and the very real, very physical limits of our power grids.
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  Speaker 0: and our water supplies.
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  Speaker 1: It's become an engineering crisis as much as a climate one.
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  Speaker 1: We have a lot to get through today.
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  Speaker 1: I mean, from this energy blind spot of AI to some really surprising things like wooden data centers.
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  Speaker 0: Oh, that financial case study is going to turn some heads too.
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  Speaker 0: But yeah, we have to start with a big picture first.
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  Speaker 0: Let's
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  Speaker 1: do it.
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  Speaker 1: So, theme one, the AI energy paradox in, well... all the risks that come with it.
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  Speaker 1: We saw a really striking post from Azra Alam that frames this perfectly.
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  Speaker 1: He calls it a massive energy blind spot.
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  Speaker 1: This is
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  Speaker 0: such a critical concept.
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  Speaker 0: Alam points out this paradox that I think catches a lot of people off guard.
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  Speaker 1: Right.
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  Speaker 0: If you look at the technical progress in just three years, the cost of AI inference, that's the compute you need to actually use a model, has dropped by a factor of a thousand.
• 2:04
  Speaker 0: It's become incredibly efficient.
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  Speaker 1: And in almost any other industry, if you make something a thousand times more efficient, your resource use goes way down.
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  Speaker 1: It
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  Speaker 0: goes down.
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  Speaker 0: Exactly.
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  Speaker 0: But here we have the Jevons paradox.
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  Speaker 0: When a resource like Compute gets cheaper, demand doesn't just stay flat.
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  Speaker 0: It explodes.
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  Speaker 0: All on highlights that because it's so cheap to use AI, we're putting it everywhere.
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  Speaker 0: So while the unit cost is down, the total energy consumption is just.
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  Speaker 0: skyrocketing.
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  Speaker 1: He had some numbers that were frankly hard to process.
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  Speaker 1: He said global data center electricity is set to more than double to nine hundred and forty five terawatt hours by twenty
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  Speaker 0: thirty.
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  Speaker 0: Just to put that number in perspective nine hundred and forty five terawatt hours is it's roughly the annual electricity use of a major industrial country like Japan.
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  Speaker 1: So we're adding a new Japan to the grid just for servers.
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  Speaker 0: We basically are.
• 2:54
  Speaker 0: And he drilled down on the U.S.
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  Speaker 0: saying data centers could go from four percent of national electricity to maybe twelve percent.
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  Speaker 0: It's not a small increase.
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  Speaker 0: That is a structural change to the entire grid.
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  Speaker 1: A huge change.
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  Speaker 0: And John Beger added another layer to this.
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  Speaker 0: He noted that we focus on inference, the user side, but the training of these models is an industrial beast.
• 3:12
  Speaker 0: Right.
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  Speaker 1: The initial build.
• 3:14
  Speaker 0: Training a frontier model now uses electricity comparable to you know, a national infrastructure project.
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  Speaker 0: This isn't light software anymore.
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  Speaker 0: It's heavy industry that just happens to be digital.
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  Speaker 1: Heavy industry with a very sleek UI.
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  Speaker 1: But underneath, it's all heat, metal, and electricity.
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  Speaker 1: And speaking of heat, that brings us to the other resource Masoud Barakzai brought up, water.
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  Speaker 0: Yeah, this is the wet cost of AI.
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  Speaker 0: It gets overlooked all the time.
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  Speaker 0: Data centers are incredibly hot.
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  Speaker 0: And to cool them, many systems evaporate huge volumes of fresh water.
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  Speaker 0: Barakzai said the consumption now rivals the entire global bottled water industry.
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  Speaker 0: That's
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  Speaker 1: a staggering visual.
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  Speaker 1: So every time I'm chatting with an AI, somewhere a tiny invisible bottle of water is being poured out to keep the servers cool.
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  Speaker 0: That's essentially it.
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  Speaker 0: Yes.
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  Speaker 0: And in places already facing drought, I mean, this becomes a huge political issue.
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  Speaker 0: You've got data centers competing with farms for water.
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  Speaker 1: Which explains why the tone from the financial side is shifting.
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  Speaker 1: We saw Inel again talking about investor sentiment.
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  Speaker 0: The vibe has definitely changed in the boardrooms.
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  Speaker 0: Lagenz says investors are now demanding to know the footprint per use case.
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  Speaker 1: So it's a license to operate issue.
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  Speaker 0: It is.
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  Speaker 0: You can't just pitch a cool AI tool anymore.
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  Speaker 0: If the metabolic cost of that tool is too high, the capital is just going to walk away.
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  Speaker 0: Yeah.
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  Speaker 0: Because it's a risk.
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  Speaker 0: That's
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  Speaker 1: huge risk.
• 4:34
  Speaker 0: Precisely.
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  Speaker 0: And Nolan Gadard took that risk assessment even further.
• 4:38
  Speaker 0: She argues we're facing a compound threat.
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  Speaker 0: It's not just climate risk.
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  Speaker 0: It's climate plus cyber plus AI risk.
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  Speaker 0: all tangled together.
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  Speaker 1: So how does that work?
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  Speaker 1: Like a chain reaction?
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  Speaker 1: Yeah,
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  Speaker 0: imagine a cyber attack on a power grid that's already strained by AI demand, all happening during a climate change driven heat wave.
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  Speaker 0: It's a cascading failure.
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  Speaker 0: Godard's point is that this creates an insurance gap.
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  Speaker 0: Insurers are looking at this mess and saying, This is becoming uninsurable.
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  Speaker 1: It's a pressure from all sides.
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  Speaker 1: The grid, the water, the insurers.
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  Speaker 1: We can't just keep building the same way, which, I mean, is a perfect segue to our second theme.
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  Speaker 1: Green infrastructure.
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  Speaker 0: Yes, this is a crucial pivot.
• 5:16
  Speaker 0: PS Lee introduced a concept I think we're going to hear a lot more about.
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  Speaker 0: He says, we need to stop viewing data centers as AI factories.
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  Speaker 1: A factory that doesn't apply, you know, a one-way street.
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  Speaker 1: Raw materials in, product doubt, waste out the back.
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  Speaker 0: Exactly.
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  Speaker 0: Lee argues we should treat them as climate assets.
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  Speaker 1: Okay, that sounds like a great rebrand, but what does that mean in practice?
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  Speaker 1: How does a building full of servers become a climate asset?
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  Speaker 0: It means the facility is designed to solve energy problems, not just create them.
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  Speaker 0: For one, designing for two hundred and forty seven carbon free energy.
• 5:49
  Speaker 0: But the really big one is treating waste heat as a resource.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: Great capturing all that heat.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah,
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  Speaker 0: if you can capture that heat and pipe it into a district heating system for homes or use it in greenhouses, you turn a waste product into a revenue stream.
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  Speaker 0: You actually integrate the data center into the community.
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  Speaker 0: That's
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  Speaker 1: the ideal.
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  Speaker 1: But the transition is messy.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: Anna Leonard-Nesbitt shared a reality check from Phoenix, Arizona that really stuck with me.
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  Speaker 0: The Phoenix story is fascinating.
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  Speaker 0: It's a perfect example of what she calls the decarbonization paradox.
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  Speaker 1: So laid out for us, Phoenix is a desert, tons of sun, so lots of solar potential, but a huge data center boom.
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  Speaker 0: A massive boom.
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  Speaker 0: They have thirty thousand megawatts of data center requests in the queue.
• 6:31
  Speaker 0: That's four times their current peak load.
• 6:33
  Speaker 0: Wow.
• 6:34
  Speaker 0: And the paradox is, despite all that new solar power, emissions are actually going up.
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  Speaker 0: How
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  Speaker 1: is that even
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  Speaker 0: possible?
• 6:40
  Speaker 0: It's the timing.
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  Speaker 0: Solar is intermittent.
• 6:43
  Speaker 0: It works when the sun shines, but AI data centers are always on.
• 6:47
  Speaker 0: They have a flat high load, two forty seven.
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  Speaker 0: So when the sun goes down, they still need massive power and the utilities have to fire up gas plans to cover that night shift.
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  Speaker 1: So adding renewables doesn't automatically clean up the grid if the demand doesn't match when the power is being made.
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  Speaker 0: Exactly.
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  Speaker 0: It's a grid jam.
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  Speaker 0: But while the energy side is tricky... We did see some really cool innovation on the construction side, less about power, more about materials.
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  Speaker 0: Carl Rabe was posting about wooden data centers.
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  Speaker 1: I have to admit, wooden data centers sounds like a fire hazard from the eighteen hundreds, but this is high tech, right?
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  Speaker 0: Yeah, we aren't talking about log cabin.
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  Speaker 0: This is engineered timber, like cross laminated timber.
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  Speaker 0: It's incredibly strong and fire resistant.
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  Speaker 0: But the key is what's called embodied carbon.
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  Speaker 1: That's the carbon emitted just to make the building materials in the first place.
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  Speaker 0: Correct.
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  Speaker 0: Concrete and steel are incredibly carbon intensive.
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  Speaker 0: Wood stores carbon.
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  Speaker 0: RABE even calls using Timber a status symbol.
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  Speaker 0: It signals you're thinking about the entire life cycle, not just operations.
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  Speaker 1: And Victor Patek added to this with the trend of prefabricated data centers.
• 7:51
  Speaker 0: Oh, prefab is the unsung hero here.
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  Speaker 0: Instead of a messy construction site, you build modular units in a factory.
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  Speaker 0: Patek notes that prefab generates over fifty percent less embodied carbon per square meter than a traditional concrete build.
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  Speaker 0: It's faster, cleaner, just much less wasteful.
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  Speaker 1: But sometimes it's not how you build but where.
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  Speaker 1: Alice Edge shared a great example of vivo power buying a hydropower data center in Norway.
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  Speaker 1: This
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  Speaker 0: goes right back to the climate asset idea.
• 8:18
  Speaker 0: It's about geography.
• 8:20
  Speaker 0: If you're training a huge AI model, it doesn't need to be in downtown Phoenix.
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  Speaker 0: You don't need low latency for training.
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  Speaker 0: So you move the compute to the power.
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  Speaker 1: And Norway has tons of hydropower and natural cooling.
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  Speaker 0: Exactly.
• 8:31
  Speaker 0: Instead of bringing the power to the data center, you take the data center to the power.
• 8:35
  Speaker 0: You create a sustainable ecosystem.
• 8:37
  Speaker 0: that just isn't possible in a water-stressed desert.
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  Speaker 1: Okay, so we've covered the shell, the timber buildings, the Norwegian hydro plants.
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  Speaker 1: Now let's look inside.
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  Speaker 1: Theme three, green software and architecture.
• 8:51
  Speaker 0: This is where the rubber really meets the road for developers.
• 8:55
  Speaker 0: You can have the greenest building in the world, but if your code is inefficient, you're still wasting energy.
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  Speaker 0: Anita Schutler made a compelling case that software architecture is a climate issue.
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  Speaker 1: She used this comparison of monolithic systems versus verticalization.
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  Speaker 1: Can you break that down?
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  Speaker 1: Sure.
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  Speaker 0: Think of a monolithic system like a giant factory, where everything, all the lights, all the machines is on a single on-off switch.
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  Speaker 1: So even if you just need one little machine, you have to power up the whole building.
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  Speaker 0: You got it.
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  Speaker 0: Incredibly wasteful.
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  Speaker 0: But that's how a lot of legacy software works.
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  Speaker 0: Verticalizing means you break it down into smaller components, so you only power up the specific resources you need for a specific task.
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  Speaker 1: And this isn't just about saving the planet.
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  Speaker 1: This is where the money comes back in.
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  Speaker 1: Arwell Owen shared what might be the stat of the week about SAP systems.
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  Speaker 1: This
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  Speaker 0: was a massive aha moment.
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  Speaker 0: His team managed to cut five million euros from a client's SAP on AWS spend.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: Wait.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: Five million euros?
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: That is not
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  Speaker 0: pocket change.
• 9:52
  Speaker 0: Not at all.
• 9:53
  Speaker 0: And they did it just by applying fine ops and green computing principles.
• 9:56
  Speaker 0: It just proves that green IT is in a charity project.
• 9:59
  Speaker 0: It's a profitability strategy.
• 10:01
  Speaker 0: When you optimize your code, you are directly cutting your OPEX.
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  Speaker 1: That's the argument that gets the CFO on board.
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  Speaker 1: You tell them it's green, they smile, you tell them it saves five million euros, they sign the check.
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  Speaker 0: Exactly.
• 10:13
  Speaker 0: But how do developers actually do this?
• 10:16
  Speaker 0: Hannah Herbst emphasized green coding.
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  Speaker 1: Is that like a specific language or a methodology?
• 10:20
  Speaker 0: It's a methodology.
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  Speaker 0: It's about optimizing algorithms to lower CPU load, just writing cleaner, tighter code.
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  Speaker 0: But Nicholas Sundberg added another layer, moving from code to operations.
• 10:31
  Speaker 0: He talks about workload placement.
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  Speaker 1: That sounds like the digital version of the Norway example.
• 10:36
  Speaker 0: It is.
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  Speaker 0: Sundberg says we need to be smart about when and where we run big jobs.
• 10:41
  Speaker 0: If it's not time sensitive, don't run it at six p.m.
• 10:44
  Speaker 0: when the grid is dirty.
• 10:45
  Speaker 0: run it at two a.m.
• 10:46
  Speaker 0: when the wind is blowing, or move the job to a region with a cleaner grid.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: To do that, you need to know which regions are green.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: Kevin Leslie from GreenPixie shared a tool for this, the cloud region scorecard.
• 10:57
  Speaker 0: Transparency is everything here.
• 10:59
  Speaker 0: You can't manage what you don't measure.
• 11:01
  Speaker 0: This scorecard rates cloud regions from A plus down to D. It's like the energy sticker on your fridge.
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  Speaker 0: So a developer can look and say, OK, US East is a D, but this region in Canada is an A plus E. I'll deploy there.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: It empowers engineers to make those micro decisions that add up, and we're seeing this get more formal too.
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: David Kot mentioned the KDI open source framework received the Blue Angel certification.
• 11:24
  Speaker 0: The Blue Angel is a big deal in Europe.
• 11:26
  Speaker 0: It's a serious eco label.
• 11:28
  Speaker 0: Seeing software get that kind of certification shows we're moving past the Wild West era.
• 11:33
  Speaker 0: These are becoming standardized, verifiable metrics.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: Okay, so we've covered the huge infrastructure and the invisible code, but we can't ignore the stuff we can actually touch.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: Theme four brings us to circularity and the devices on our desks.
• 11:47
  Speaker 0: Yeah, this is often the forgotten piece.
• 11:49
  Speaker 0: We talk about the cloud, but we access it through plastic, glass, and rare earth minerals.
• 11:53
  Speaker 0: Rudd Neal had a great post about circular computing.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: He was talking about remanufactured laptops, and he made a really important distinction between remanufactured and just, you know, used.
• 12:04
  Speaker 0: That distinction is critical.
• 12:06
  Speaker 0: A CTO isn't going to give their team beat up laptops.
• 12:10
  Speaker 0: Neil argues that true re-manufacturing restores the device to like new or even better than new performance.
• 12:16
  Speaker 0: It removes the trade off.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: So you get a top tier machine, but you haven't had to dig up a mine for new cobalt?
• 12:22
  Speaker 0: Exactly.
• 12:23
  Speaker 0: And Nabil K reinforced this with a concept he calls digital sobriety.
• 12:27
  Speaker 0: I love
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: that
• 12:28
  Speaker 0: term.
• 12:28
  Speaker 0: It's a simple but powerful idea.
• 12:30
  Speaker 0: The most sustainable device is the one you already own.
• 12:33
  Speaker 0: We have this culture of constant refresh cycles.
• 12:36
  Speaker 0: Digital sobriety just challenges that.
• 12:38
  Speaker 0: Do you actually need the upgrade or do you just want it?
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: Speaking of habits, Graham Donnelly offered a really interesting checklist for remote businesses.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: And he dropped a fact about pensions that honestly blew
• 12:49
  Speaker 0: my mind.
• 12:49
  Speaker 0: The twenty-one X stat.
• 12:51
  Speaker 0: Yes.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: He said, moving your pension to a sustainable fund can have twenty-one times the impact of giving up flying.
• 12:57
  Speaker 0: It's all about leverage, right?
• 12:58
  Speaker 0: We focus on our visible actions recycling.
• 13:00
  Speaker 0: skipping a flight.
• 13:02
  Speaker 0: But the capital markets are the engine room.
• 13:04
  Speaker 0: If your pension fund is invested in fossil fuels, your money is working against your goals while you sleep.
• 13:10
  Speaker 0: Redirecting that capital is huge.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: Donnelly also mentioned decarbonizing your data, basically deleting old emails and cloud junk.
• 13:19
  Speaker 0: Digital hygiene.
• 13:19
  Speaker 0: I think we're all guilty of this.
• 13:21
  Speaker 0: Retreat cloud storage like it's infinite.
• 13:24
  Speaker 0: But every gigabyte of useless data on a server is drawing power every second of every day.
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: My inbox is basically a digital archaeological site.
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: I definitely need to do some cleaning.
• 13:33
  Speaker 0: It all ends up.
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: So let's try to pull all of this together.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: We've looked at the AI energy crisis, the shift to climate asset infrastructure, the profitability of green software, and the circular economy.
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: What's the big takeaway?
• 13:45
  Speaker 0: I think the best way to wrap this is with a thought from Lubamla Jordanova, who analyzed the WEF global risks report.
• 13:53
  Speaker 0: She talks about something called the horizon gap.
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: The horizon gap sounds ominous.
• 13:58
  Speaker 0: It is, but it's also a call to action.
• 14:01
  Speaker 0: The horizon gap is this disconnect between what companies are doing right now and what the data says they need to be doing for the next decade.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: So companies are reacting to the noise right in front of them.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: Trade wars, the latest AI hype.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: hitting quarterly numbers.
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 14:17
  Speaker 0: They're optimizing for short-term volatility.
• 14:19
  Speaker 0: But if you look at the ten-year outlook in that report, environmental risks completely dominate.
• 14:24
  Speaker 0: Jordan Nova's point is that our short-term reactions are feeling to align with long-term reality.
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: That's a heavy thought.
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: It implies we might be efficient today, but we aren't building resilience for twenty thirty-five.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: That's
• 14:35
  Speaker 0: the question I'd leave listeners with.
• 14:37
  Speaker 0: Are your current tech efficiencies actually building resilience?
• 14:40
  Speaker 0: Or are you just optimizing a system that won't survive the regulatory and physical climate of the next decade?
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: It pushes the conversation way beyond just being green.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: It's about being future-proof.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: If your entire AI strategy relies on cheap infinite energy and water, you might be building on sand.
• 14:58
  Speaker 0: Precisely.
• 14:59
  Speaker 0: The winners in the next decade won't just be the fastest.
• 15:02
  Speaker 0: They'll be the ones who close that horizon gap.
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: Well, on that note, we have plenty to think about before we upgrade our next laptop or deploy our next AI model.
• 15:10
  Speaker 0: Indeed.
• 15:11
  Speaker 0: It's a challenging time, but seeing all this innovation, it's also a very exciting
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: one.
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: If you enjoyed this episode, new episodes drop every two weeks.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: Also, check out our other editions on cloud.
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: digital products and services, artificial intelligence, and ICT and tech insights, health tech, defense tech.
• 15:28
  Speaker 0: Thanks for listening everyone.
• 15:29
  Speaker 0: Don't
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: forget to subscribe.
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: See you next time.