7 de gen. 2025
2 de gen. 2025
Digital services / Cloud computing
Calculating the carbon footprint of virtual desktop infrastructure
The Green Cloud Computing research project (in German) analysed the carbon footprint of a computer workspace equipped with virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) as compared to the classical solution. VDI means that the entire computer desktop in the data centre has been virtualised. All the specific settings, software products and data are no longer installed on the local computer but on a server in the data centre. This no longer requires the standard PC and energy-saving thin clients can be used instead, which serves as the interface to the server. Our calculations conclude that a workstation equipped with a VDI (thin client computer) generates 33 kilograms fewer emissions than a workstation using a notebook or a desktop PC. The calculations include the manufacturing costs for the hardware in the data centre and for the local thin client computers as well as the power consumption in the data centre and at the workstation. However, the sensitivity analysis shows that it is not always more favourable to the climate to move IT services to the cloud. What is important is the equipment of the local workstation, how IT is utilised and whether the infrastructure of the data centre is geared to requirements.
16 de des. 2024
The Unpaid Toll: Quantifying the Public Health Impact of AI
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06288
The surging demand for AI has led to a rapid expansion of energy-intensive data centers, impacting the environment through escalating carbon emissions and water consumption. While significant attention has been paid to AI's growing environmental footprint, the public health burden, a hidden toll of AI, has been largely overlooked. Specifically, AI's lifecycle, from chip manufacturing to data center operation, significantly degrades air quality through emissions of criteria air pollutants such as fine particulate matter, substantially impacting public health. This paper introduces a methodology to model pollutant emissions across AI's lifecycle, quantifying the public health impacts. Our findings reveal that training an AI model of the Llama3.1 scale can produce air pollutants equivalent to more than 10,000 round trips by car between Los Angeles and New York City. The total public health burden of U.S. data centers in 2030 is valued at up to more than $20 billion per year, double that of U.S. coal-based steelmaking and comparable to that of on-road emissions of California. Further, the public health costs unevenly impact economically disadvantaged communities, where the per-household health burden could be 200x more than that in less-impacted communities. We recommend adopting a standard reporting protocol for criteria air pollutants and the public health costs of AI, paying attention to all impacted communities, and implementing health-informed AI to mitigate adverse effects while promoting public health equity.
Air Pollution and the Public Health Costs of AI
With the growing adoption of large language models, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, the enormous environmental footprint of artificial intelligence, or AI, is increasingly in the news. This cost is often discussed in terms of electricity consumed, carbon released into the atmosphere, and water needed to operate massive data centers.
12 de des. 2024
Whitepaper: Digitalización, sostenibilidad y centros de datos
Este documento es una investigación sobre la relación entre el desarrollo de la economía digital en España y su influencia en índices de desarrollo sostenible como las emisiones de CO2. Sus conclusiones se centran en los efectos del binomio digitalización-sostenibilidad a nivel macro y microeconómico.
El binomio digitalización-sostenibilidad es hoy evidente: la digitalización es una condición necesaria para lograr los objetivos de responsabilidad medioambiental, pues contribuye a la descarbonización de la economía. En nuestro país ya superamos el umbral de desarrollo digital a partir del cual una mayor digitalización supone menores emisiones.
El estudio confirma que en la actualidad una mayor intensidad digital está asociada a una reducción sistemática de emisiones de CO2 per cápita. Descarga el informe para saber más sobre el efecto positivo que la economía del dato está generando para reducir las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero y el papel de infraestructuras críticas como los centros de datos para facilitar la interconexión entre usuarios y servicios digitales.
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