Sustainability is a core pillar in corporate decision-making

I’m still riding the high from a virtual conference I attended last week, the #SixFiveSummit. I learned so much and was inspired with how industry leaders are harnessing innovation to improve people’s lives.

My biggest takeaway was the emphasis on sustainability and how it’s become a bedrock of corporate decision-making. In fact, Todd Brady from Intel Corporation explained that executive bonuses are tied to achieving sustainability goals.

Across all the sessions, I noticed four key focus areas for sustainability:

1. Sustainable manufacturing and reducing greenhouse gas emissions
2. Developing energy efficient products for consumers
3. Developing products that enable organizations to meet sustainability goals
4. Eco-friendly packaging - think bamboo boxes and vegan leather

Todd Brady has spent his career at Intel focusing on sustainability. He shared that Intel has spent decades reducing greenhouse gas emissions, achieving 80% reduction to-date. They’re now looking at other chemistries to make semiconductors to ultimately drive to zero or net zero greenhouse gas emissions.

Also at Intel, Eric Fetzer and Ben Sell have been working together to align, design, and manufacture the products of the future. With their teams, Fetzer and Sell have rebuilt the core with backside power delivery to achieve:

• 90% cell utilization
• 30% reduction in power supply losses
• 6% frequency improvement

Eric explains that backside power delivery results in performance improvement across all workloads, but specifically the ones that take high power. Some examples include AI, graphics, high performance computing, and gaming, to name a few. Basically all the important applications that we increasingly rely on.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is also hyper focused on sustainability. Nelson Gonzalez explained how sustainability is not only imperative for humanity, but it also drives business growth. He shared that the companies that find new value at the intersection of digital technologies and sustainability will experience rapid growth. In fact, companies powered by these “twin engines of growth” (innovation and sustainability) are 2.5x more likely to outperform competitors.

Gonzales also points out that the cloud itself is a move towards sustainability: "When compared to data centers across the world, AWS can lower a customer's carbon footprint by nearly 80% today, and once we achieve our targets, that number will jump to around 96%. And we're on the path to being 100% renewable by 2025, which will allow all of us to achieve those targets."

Kirk Skaugen from Lenovo shared that they operate in 180 markets and control 35 manufacturing facilities. Their work in reducing emissions has earned them ratification by the Science Based Targets initiative on 2050 net zero goals. They were the first PC company to do that.

From a product perspective, Lenovo is looking at ways to reduce power. For example, their Neptune warm water cooling technology is reducing power by up to 40%. They’re also focusing on packaging alternatives, such as bamboo and vegan leather alternatives.

The significance of these global leaders focusing on sustainability as a core pillar can’t be overstated. The proliferation of advanced technologies requiring tremendous computing power (think AI) is ever increasing and needs to be matched with sustainable solutions.

As Niklas Heuveldop of Ericsson pointed out, the "tech sector is remarkably resilient." Innovation coupled with sustainability is the core to resiliency. Let’s hope companies across all industries and sectors follow the lead.

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I'm a Six Five Summit ambassador and wrote this article in support of a paid campaign.

#SFAmbassador #sustainability #netzero #AI #ML #semiconductors #AWSCloud #cloud #manufacturing #innovation Patrick Moorhead Daniel Newman The Futurum Group Moor Insights & Strategy