SUSTAINABILITY
catastrophic storms , severe wildfires , intense droughts and flooding an increasingly common occurrence ,” reflects Tate Cantrell , Chief Technology Officer at Verne Global - a UK based high performance computing ( HPC ) data centre operator with an ultragreen , ultra-powerful campus in Iceland . Cantrell , along with other experts throughout the data centre industry , is painfully aware of the paradoxical question facing data centre operators at the outset of this new decade . How can an energy and water-hungry industry meet a decade of soaring demand while making meaningful , sustainable efforts to mitigate its destruction of the planet ?
“ We do not have generations with which we can make slow progress ,” says Cantrell . “ We need to be progressive in our use of technologies in the data centre to give us the best chance of combating climate change now .”
“Many climate change ‘ what ifs ’ have become a reality ”
TATE CANTRELL CTO , VERNE GLOBAL
The Greenwashing Issue Obviously , the looming threat of the climate crisis hasn ’ t gone unnoticed over the past decade . Go back ten or fifteen years and operators ’ attitudes towards efficiency , sourcing renewable energy , and - perhaps most notably - green messaging looked very different to today . “ Increasingly , corporations and tech giants are pledging to go carbon neutral , with companies across all sectors making bold carbon reduction commitments ,” says Cantrell , in reference to sweeping industry action like the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact announced in 2020 . It ’ s been a rare month this year that ’ s passed without another large scale data centre corporation announcing plans for achieving “ net zero ” or “ carbon neutrality ” by 2030 , 2040 , or the middle of the century . By this point , data
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