BT: Carbon Dashboard for Improved AI Sustainability
As organisations worldwide rush to implement AI solutions, the energy demands of these sophisticated systems are becoming increasingly apparent.
AI applications can cause sharp, unpredictable increases in bandwidth demand, leading to spikes in power usage across infrastructure traditionally designed for more predictable workloads.
This surge in energy consumption poses a significant challenge for companies striving to reduce their carbon footprint while simultaneously scaling up AI capabilities.
UK headquartered telco BT Group aims to support its customers in reducing carbon emissions from AI workloads through expansion of its Carbon Network Dashboard.
“BT is committed to helping customers innovate to achieve sustainable growth,” says Sarwar Khan, Sustainability Director, Business at BT.
“With our Carbon Network Dashboard, we can help them adopt AI at scale while optimising their infrastructure to achieve their decarbonisation goals. It’s a great example of how BT has their back.”
How BT can support data centre sustainability
BT's expanded Carbon Network Dashboard offers business customers unprecedented visibility into electricity consumption and carbon emissions at an individual workload and application level.
This granular insight allows organisations to optimise their data centre and network infrastructure more effectively, managing emissions as they adopt AI applications at scale.
- Changing network design, capacity and management
- Optimising applications and AI workloads
- Develop distributed architectures, which bring components of AI closer to users, devices and machines
The dashboard provides a single, end-to-end, near real-time view of electricity usage across a customer's network and data-centre infrastructure.
Crucially, it can now tie this consumption to traffic patterns caused by individual applications, including AI.
BT also offers a sustainable network design and refresh service.
This service utilises insights from the Carbon Network Dashboard to help customers adapt their infrastructure, either by changing network design, capacity and management, or by optimising applications and AI workloads.
Developing data centres responsibly
Research from McKinsey shows that data centre power consumption in Europe will surge more than 300% by 2030.
It says this increase will be driven by increased digitisation and AI advancements.
In 2023, BT trialled liquid cooling technologies for data centres across its networks to improve energy efficiency and reduce consumption.
This was part of BT’s commitment to become a net zero business in 2031 and across its supply chain in 2041.
BT’s sustainability efforts
BT says it set one of the world’s first science-based climate targets in 2008.
The company's near-term target is aligned to a 1.5 degrees Celsius pathway and validated by the Science Based Targets institute (SBTi).
All of the electricity purchased BT to power its buildings, shops and networks is certified as renewable worldwide.
Where the company cannot guarantee the origin of electricity it purchases additional Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs).
In FY24, BT cut its global energy consumption by 150 GWh and it is moving to fewer, more sustainable and efficient buildings.
In 2021, the company set the goal of supporting its customers to avoid 60 million tonnes of CO2e by 2030.
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