News

Datacentre energy efficiency and green IT

• January 24, 2022 24 Jan'22

  Carbon emissions data to become key factor in cloud purchases by 2025, predicts Gartner

  With enterprises across the world looking to become more sustainable and environmentally friendly, Gartner claims carbon emissions data will become a key factor in the cloud purchasing decisions of IT buyers by 2025

• January 06, 2022 06 Jan'22

  Amazon and Stellantis embark on multi-year, cloud-focused connected car push

  Amazon has signed a series of deals with Fiat’s parent company, focused on enhancing the connected car experience for consumers, as well as improving the sustainability of the online retail giant’s delivery fleet

• December 31, 2021 31 Dec'21

  Top 10 Computer Weekly Downtime Upload podcasts of 2021

  The Computer Weekly Downtime Upload podcast team began the year discussing the online fallout from the storming of the White House and finished it discussing IT and climate change, touching on bees and datacentres along the way

• December 20, 2021 20 Dec'21

  Top 10 datacentre stories of 2021

  Here are Computer Weekly’s top 10 datacentre stories of 2021

• December 13, 2021 13 Dec'21

  Industry group aims to tackle energy-efficient software development

  How many processor cycles does an algorithm use? Can it use less and, if so, how will this reduce overall energy usage and greenhouse emissions?

• December 09, 2021 09 Dec'21

  NEXTDC opens edge datacentre on the Sunshine Coast

  NEXTDC’s SC1 facility is the first in a series of edge datacentre sites that will provide low-latency services to regional businesses and global linkages

• December 07, 2021 07 Dec'21

  Government makes £116m pledge to help UK's green-tech firms innovate to fight climate change

  The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has outlined its commitment to helping UK green-tech businesses bring to market innovations that could help fight climate change

• December 07, 2021 07 Dec'21

  Schneider Electric gifts the datacentre industry a five-part sustainability framework

  Datacentre power systems specialist has drawn up a framework that it hopes will help the industry standardise its reporting of sustainability metrics

• November 17, 2021 17 Nov'21

  Average size of hyperscale datacentres is on the rise

  Latest data from IT market watcher Synergy Research Group highlights how the number and size of hyperscale datacentres around the world is on the up

• November 17, 2021 17 Nov'21

  COP26: Lord Maude on using open source to help fight against climate change

  Public and private sector organisations need to pool their resources and collaborate to address the climate crisis by using open source technologies, urged Lord Maude during OpenUK’s COP26 event

• November 15, 2021 15 Nov'21

  UK’s first datacentre-focused University Technical College course makes its debut

  Some of the datacentre sector’s biggest players have pooled their resources to help launch the UK’s first industry-specific University Technical College course

• November 12, 2021 12 Nov'21

  OpenUK debuts carbon-negative datacentre blueprint at COP26

  Open source championing not-for-profit OpenUK puts forward plan to reduce the environmental impact of datacentres, with an emphasis on encouraging site and hardware reuse

• November 09, 2021 09 Nov'21

  Public cloud use linked to reduced carbon emissions and energy consumption, finds 451 Research

  IT analyst house 451 Research claims European enterprises could dramatically improve their sustainability credentials by shuttering their datacentres and moving their business applications to the public cloud

• November 08, 2021 08 Nov'21

  Irish government confirms datacentre strategy review in revised 2021 climate plan

  The Irish government is ramping up its commitment to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, but acknowledges hitting its revised up target will be a challenge given the country’s current datacentre growth rate

• November 07, 2021 07 Nov'21

  Businesses failing to cut carbon footprint of ‘power-hungry’ technology

  Tackling the power consumption of datacentres features low on the list of tech leaders’ priorities, but pressures to change are growing

• November 02, 2021 02 Nov'21

  Electronic waste excluded from COP26 agenda

  Data sanitation industry group calls on UK government to add electronic waste to the climate summit’s agenda

• October 28, 2021 28 Oct'21

  Benioffs and Salesforce put $300m into combating climate change on eve of COP26

  $200m committed to reforestation and restoration efforts, and $100m for non-profits over the next 10 years

• October 27, 2021 27 Oct'21

  Microsoft: Solving the climate crisis will require moon landing levels of tech innovation

  Microsoft’s chief environmental officer says it’s not too late to prevent a climate disaster, but doing so will require a group effort and levels of tech innovation on a par with those needed to put a man on the moon

• October 19, 2021 19 Oct'21

  Government flags opportunity for re-use of waste datacentre heat in net-zero strategy

  UK government's long-awaited net-zero strategy document makes the case for the creation of heat networks that could see waste heat from datacentres used to warm homes and businesses

• October 13, 2021 13 Oct'21

  Microsoft makes carbon emissions-tracking dashboard generally available to cloud users

  Microsoft has confirmed the general availability of a dashboard that will allow enterprises to track the greenhouse gas emissions generated by their cloud usage habits in latest sustainability push

• October 13, 2021 13 Oct'21

  Google Cloud renews commitment to helping enterprises decarbonise their IT infrastructure

  Public cloud giant is making a series of tools available to users of its off-premise platforms that are designed to help them decarbonise their IT setups

• October 11, 2021 11 Oct'21

  Oracle commits to growing global datacentre footprint by opening 14 new regions over coming year

  Database giant to build out its datacentre presence across the world on the back of growing demand for its cloud infrastructure services

• October 05, 2021 05 Oct'21

  Kao Data secures up to £130m in funding to finance colocation datacentre expansions

  Harlow-based colocation giant has secure further investment as its expansion plans gather pace

• September 27, 2021 27 Sep'21

  Private equity cash fuels Nordic datacentre growth

  Private equity companies are betting on the Nordic datacentre sector as demand for services in the region accelerates

• September 23, 2021 23 Sep'21

  European cloud providers are growing revenue but losing market share, Synergy data shows

  Latest data from Synergy Research Group highlights changing dynamics within the European cloud market, as the US giants continue to grow their share

• September 23, 2021 23 Sep'21

  SSE Renewables teams up with Microsoft for AI-led puffin conservation project on Isle of May

  Green energy provider talks up the potential for artificial intelligence technology to help speed up the time it takes to bring new supplies of renewable power onto the grid

• September 14, 2021 14 Sep'21

  TikTok’s take-off fuels hyperscale datacentre spend by parent company ByteDance

  Following its meteoric rise to social media prominence, TikTok’s parent company is confirmed as being the world’s seventh-biggest datacentre spender after just three years of expansion

• September 14, 2021 14 Sep'21

  Uptime Institute highlights patchy reporting of water use by datacentre operators

  With the water usage habits of datacentres coming under increased scrutiny, research from resiliency think tank Uptime Institute highlights shortcomings in the sector's reporting of how much water facilities use

• September 13, 2021 13 Sep'21

  Google joins Microsoft and Facebook by pledging to replenish more water than it consumes by 2030

  Google is the latest tech giant to go public with its commitment to becoming a water-positive entity

• September 06, 2021 06 Sep'21

  Verne Global acquired for £231m as Nordic datacentre investment trend gathers pace

  Icelandic colocation firm acquired by digital infrastructure investment fund as demand for datacentre capacity in the Nordics continues to grow

• August 20, 2021 20 Aug'21

  Facebook vows to replenish more water than it consumes across its global operations by 2030

  Social networking giant is following in Microsoft’s footprints by setting itself a goal of becoming a water-positive entity by 2030

• August 11, 2021 11 Aug'21

  Norway’s government steps up efforts to court overseas datacentre investors and developers

  The Norwegian government is making a concerted push to attract more foreign investment into its datacentre sector by talking up the country’s green credentials

• August 09, 2021 09 Aug'21

  Alliance formed to build modular power-hungry HPC datacentres in energy surplus regions

  Green datacentre company Cloud&Heat Technologies has formed an alliance with Earth Wind & Power that will see the pair seek to build scalable, modular datacentres in areas where utility firms are producing surplus energy

• August 04, 2021 04 Aug'21

  Research points to growing importance of secondary datacentre hubs across Europe in years to come

  Datacentrepricing’s half-year look at the growth of the European datacentre market reinforces the rising importance of secondary datacentre hubs across the continent

• August 04, 2021 04 Aug'21

  Dropbox shares datacentre sustainability strategy as it plots to be 100% renewably powered by 2030

  Cloud-based file sync and share giant goes public with plans to run all its datacentres on renewable power by 2030

• July 30, 2021 30 Jul'21

  Covid-19: TechUK urges government to tweak self-isolation policy for critical datacentre workers

  TechUK wants datacentre operators to be allowed to run their own "test and release" protocols for Covid-negative workers that have been told to self-isolate by NHS Track and Trace

• July 28, 2021 28 Jul'21

  APAC organisations can reduce carbon footprint with cloud

  Energy savings of nearly 80% can be achieved by running business applications in the cloud rather than on-premise infrastructure, study finds

• July 22, 2021 22 Jul'21

  Beeinfotech PH opens telco-neutral datacentre in the Philippines

  Datacentre startup is touting carrier neutrality, bespoke services and cyber security capabilities to meet the growing demand for co-location services in the Philippines

• July 20, 2021 20 Jul'21

  Government shares vision for digitised energy system as it pursues net-zero emissions target

  Strategy is geared towards readying the UK energy system for the transition from fossil fuels to renewable power through digital transformation

• July 19, 2021 19 Jul'21

  Kao Data claims UK first with push to ditch diesel for biofuel in datacentre backup generators

  Harlow-based colocation player claims its on course to become the first datacentre operator in the UK to ditch diesel in favour of biofuel in its backup power generators

• July 15, 2021 15 Jul'21

  Virgin Media outage: Electrical explosion takes down network in south-east London

  Underground electrical network explosion causes ‘significant collateral damage’ to cabling infrastructure, with users in south-east London told to brace themselves for ‘at least’ 24 hours of disruption

• July 13, 2021 13 Jul'21

  Digital Realty retains EMEA colocation market leader status in H1 2021

  Half-yearly datacentre market tracker data from Cloudscene confirms Digital Realty remains the operator to beat in EMEA, but its nearest rival, Equinix, leads the market in several other regions

• July 05, 2021 05 Jul'21

  Ascendas India Trust to build datacentre near Mumbai

  New datacentre campus near Mumbai will deliver 90MW of power to host technology and cloud suppliers as well as large Indian companies in a fast-growing market

• June 30, 2021 30 Jun'21

  Interxion creates London-wide colocation datacentre hub through £1.1m fibre cable roll-out

  Colocation giant Interxion has invested £1.1m in a network roll-out that will connect up eight of its London-based datacentres

• June 28, 2021 28 Jun'21

  Green Mountain agrees to let land-based trout farm make use of its datacentre's waste heated water

  Green Mountain has gone public with details of a second heat reuse agreement it has signed that will see its waste datacentre water used to warm a nearby land-based trout farm

• June 25, 2021 25 Jun'21

  Apple seeks five-year extension to planning permission deadline for Irish datacentre site

  Tech giant Apple has requested a five-year extension to the planning permission deadline for its abandoned datacentre in Ireland, as politicians call for the mothballed site to be put to use

• June 24, 2021 24 Jun'21

  Vodafone confirms European datacentres will be powered by 100% green energy by July 2021

  Telco giant claims it is on course to hit an important milestone in its latest sustainability push, with its entire European operations set to be 100% renewably powered by 1 July

• June 22, 2021 22 Jun'21

  Green Mountain signs datacentre waste heat reuse agreement with Norwegian lobster farm

  Norway-based datacentre operator signs a waste heat reuse agreement with the world’s first land-based lobster farm

• June 21, 2021 21 Jun'21

  Philanthropists join forces to create $1bn distributed green energy platform to fight climate change

  IKEA Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation to help make renewable energy more accessible as part of a global push to fight climate change and curb greenhouse gas emissions

• June 17, 2021 17 Jun'21

  Lenovo and Intel unveil second phase of Leibniz Supercomputing Centre’s HPC buildout

  Currently ranked as the 15th most powerful supercomputer in the world, Lenovo and Intel’s tech will be used to up the performance and compute capabilities of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre’s HPC environment

• June 17, 2021 17 Jun'21

  Ireland’s datacentre industry to plant 1,000 orchards by 2022 as pro-pollinator plan gathers pace

  The Host in Ireland-backed effort to get the Irish datacentre community to throw its weight behind growing the country’s population of bees and other pollinators has entered a new phase

• June 17, 2021 17 Jun'21

  Equinix vows to curb greenhouse gas emissions of its global operations

  Colocation giant Equinix is setting science-based targets to help guide its efforts to curb the amount of greenhouse gases generated by its global operations and supply chain partners

• June 16, 2021 16 Jun'21

  Singapore universities to develop cooling solutions for tropical datacentres

  The National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University will research on cooling technologies that help to lower the power consumption and carbon footprint of topical datacentres

• June 16, 2021 16 Jun'21

  Bupa goes deeper into Microsoft Azure cloud for personalised healthcare push

  International private healthcare provider is on a multi-year, cloud-led digital transformation push with the help of long-time tech collaborator Microsoft

• June 15, 2021 15 Jun'21

  Oliver Dowden hails Tech Zero Taskforce at CogX

  Government backs a group of UK tech companies and associations to combat the climate emergency, drive green investment and help consumers make greener choices

• June 03, 2021 03 Jun'21

  Atos offers enterprises digital route to net-zero emissions

  French IT services provider unveils portfolio of digital products, services, platforms and support to assist enterprises with curbing their greenhouse emissions

• May 26, 2021 26 May'21

  How Kao Data used digital twin technology to build UK’s first free-cooled wholesale colo datacentre

  Harlow-based firm claims to be the first UK wholesale colocation provider to build a free-cooled facility, with the help of digital twin and computational fluid dynamics technology

• May 20, 2021 20 May'21

  Record colocation take-up across Europe prompts renewed power supply concerns

  The latest quarterly tracker data from real estate consultancy CBRE confirms colocation operators in Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris saw another record period of growth during Q1 2021

• May 19, 2021 19 May'21

  Google to shift cloud compute tasks between datacentres based on green power availability

  Internet giant Google debuts capability that makes it possible to shift compute workloads between datacentres based on the regional availability of renewable, carbon-free power sources

• May 13, 2021 13 May'21

  Financial and technical obstacles hit Danish datacentre heat recycling plan

  A datacentre project in Denmark is grappling with the challenges of reusing waste heat in local central heating systems

• May 12, 2021 12 May'21

  Equinix shines light on changing post-pandemic investment priorities for UK IT decision-makers

  Colocation giant Equinix’s latest Tech Trends Survey takes a look at how the IT spending priorities of IT leaders across the globe have shifted in response to the Covid-19 pandemic

• May 12, 2021 12 May'21

  Irish datacentre industry urged to throw its weight behind country’s greener electricity grid push

  Host in Ireland tells industry players to work with the government and other stakeholders to boost the sustainability of the country’s electricity grid for the sake of the sector’s continued growth

• April 23, 2021 23 Apr'21

  Intel quarterly results reveal tactics to address ARM in the datacentre

  The chipmaker aims to make use of standard chip libraries and offer its customers different ways to package and optimise Intel silicon

• April 22, 2021 22 Apr'21

  Ireland’s datacentre industry launches pro-pollinator plan to boost bee population

  Host In Ireland leads efforts to encourage datacentre operators to help boost biodiversity at their sites by making them more hospitable to bees and other pollinators

• April 20, 2021 20 Apr'21

  Inside a Microsoft Azure datacentre: Cloud giant invites users on server farm virtual tour

  Software giant wants to give users a ‘tangible view’ of the inner workings of its public cloud through a newly launched virtual tour experience

• April 07, 2021 07 Apr'21

  Digital Realty expands Singapore footprint

  Digital Realty opens its third and largest datacentre in Singapore to meet the needs of local and multinational companies that are looking to deploy critical infrastructure and scale their digital business

• March 23, 2021 23 Mar'21

  Scottish government embarks on green datacentre investment push

  The Scottish government is on a mission to position Scotland as a green datacentre hub as part of a push to boost the country's economy and achieve its net-zero emissions goal by 2045

• March 19, 2021 19 Mar'21

  AWS rolls out clean energy initiative in Singapore

  62MW solar project expected to generate 80,000MWh of clean energy a year, enough to power more than 10,000 homes

• March 17, 2021 17 Mar'21

  PagerDuty expands European datacentre presence with help from AWS

  Company is expanding its datacentre presence within Europe through its longstanding technology partnership with Amazon Web Services

• March 17, 2021 17 Mar'21

  Google Cloud shares carbon-free datacentre energy usage stats with users

  Public cloud giant publishes details of its Carbon Free Energy Percentage metric that it hopes companies will use to inform their decisions about where best to run their workloads for sustainability reasons

• March 16, 2021 16 Mar'21

  NEXTDC debuts carbon-neutral colocation service

  Australian datacentre operator will buy carbon offsets to help organisations reduce their carbon footprint through a new colocation service

• March 15, 2021 15 Mar'21

  Research: Continuous upgrades to datacentre virtualisation setups key to curbing carbon emissions

  A VMware-commissioned report by Aurora Energy Research highlights environmental benefits that can be attained by operators taking steps to continually improve their datacentre virtualisation setups

• March 11, 2021 11 Mar'21

  OVHcloud datacentre fire: Efforts underway to bring affected cloud customers back online

  OVHcloud confirms it is has reserved capacity at other datacentres, and is preparing to ramp up in-house production of its servers to bring its customers back online as soon as possible

• March 10, 2021 10 Mar'21

  OVHcloud confirms no casualties following fire at Strasbourg datacentre campus

  Local media reports suggest websites across Europe have gone offline in the wake of the blaze at OVHcloud’s datacentre campus in Strasbourg, France

• March 02, 2021 02 Mar'21

  HPE called in to overhaul Swedish university’s supercomputing setup

  The Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing has commissioned HPE to build a supercomputer for one of Sweden’s largest technical universities

• March 02, 2021 02 Mar'21

  CBRE predicts 2021 will be record-breaking year for European colocation demand

  Latest quarterly market tracker report from CBRE paints a positive picture of how the growth of the European colocation market is set to proceed in the years to come

• February 26, 2021 26 Feb'21

  Amsterdam to open environmental talks with datacentres

  City authorities and datacentre operators will open dialogue about sustainable datacentre industry expansion in the Dutch capital

• February 25, 2021 25 Feb'21

  Atos and HDF Energy to build ‘green hydrogen-powered’ datacentre by 2023

  French IT services giant joins forces with green hydrogen power expert to bring to market a ‘first-of-its-kind’ datacentre by 2023

• February 17, 2021 17 Feb'21

  Defra to lead creation of cloud-focused IT sustainability standard for use across government

  Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs continues its work to help government departments clean up their IT supply chains by creating a ‘cloud sustainability’ workstream

• February 15, 2021 15 Feb'21

  Wellcome Sanger Institute embarks on cost-saving energy efficiency drive at Cambridge datacentre

  The Wellcome Sanger Institute has enlisted the help of long-standing tech partner EfficiencyIT to oversee a revamp of its datacentres’ energy monitoring and management systems

• February 15, 2021 15 Feb'21

  Power supply shortages in colocation hubs pile pressure on datacentre operators to go green

  As demand for colocation capacity continues to soar in datacentre hubs, operators are coming under increasing pressure to go green, say Telehouse Europe panel participants

• February 10, 2021 10 Feb'21

  £2bn Zero Carbon Delivery Framework goes live to help public sector datacentres go green

  A four-year, £2bn procurement framework geared towards helping public sector organisations decarbonise their operations has gone-live

• February 10, 2021 10 Feb'21

  Ducati and Lenovo extend long-standing MotoGP technology deal

  Ducati and Lenovo have signed another three-year deal that will see the MotoGP team dig deeper into its technology partner's product portfolio in pursuit of performance gains on the track by embracing virtual desktops, HPC and edge computing

• February 03, 2021 03 Feb'21

  Google grows cloud sales as parent’s profits top $40bn

  Alphabet announces massive overall profits and increased Google cloud sales

• January 29, 2021 29 Jan'21

  IBM, Apple and Accenture join MIT cross-industry climate change-tackling consortium

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s cross-industry push to tackle climate change has attracted some big names from the world of tech, including Apple, IBM, Accenture and Verizon

• January 21, 2021 21 Jan'21

  Microsoft teams up with UK startup to minimise impact of climate change by aviation industry

  Cambridge-based startup Satavia is tapping into the Microsoft Azure public cloud platform to help aviation industry minimise the impact its activities have on the environment

• January 21, 2021 21 Jan'21

  Cloud and datacentre giants unite to create climate neutral EU datacentre industry by 2030

  Major players from the world of public cloud and colocation have joined forces with trade associations from across the continent to create a climate neutral datacentre industry by 2030

• December 29, 2020 29 Dec'20

  Top 10 datacentre stories of 2020

  Here are Computer Weekly’s top 10 datacentre stories of 2020

• December 14, 2020 14 Dec'20

  CIO interview: Why IATA is banking on cloud to help the airline industry weather the Covid-19 crisis

  The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic has forced the International Air Transport Association to re-evaluate its IT investment priorities as the aviation industry shifts its focus away from business growth to business survival

• December 10, 2020 10 Dec'20

  Amazon goes public with record-breaking renewable energy generation plans

  Online retail giant Amazon has followed up earlier pledges to do more as a global organisation to tackle climate change by going public with plans to add a further 26 solar and wind farms to its portfolio

• December 10, 2020 10 Dec'20

  Arm to downsize global datacentre footprint through AWS cloud collaboration

  British semi-conductor maker Arm has committed to shrinking the size of its global datacentre estate by 45%, and plans to do so by moving some of its core chip design workloads to the AWS cloud

• December 03, 2020 03 Dec'20

  Tech and data key to achieving low-carbon economy, says Royal Society

  Report says net-zero transition should be data-led, and calls for coordination between government, regulators, industry and third sector

• November 18, 2020 18 Nov'20

  Nokia Software embarks on ‘carbon negative’ datacentre revamp push with HPE Greenlake

  Global telecoms giant Nokia Software opens up about the work it is doing to improve the environmental friendliness of the R&D datacentres underpinning its 5G innovation

• November 16, 2020 16 Nov'20

  Space DC eyes Indonesia datacentre market

  Space DC opens first of two datacentres with reliability and green features to tap Indonesia’s growing demand for datacentres

• November 09, 2020 09 Nov'20

  French bank Crédit Agricole backs immersion cooling for datacentre scale-up push

  Following the completion of a successful two-year pilot project, Crédit Agricole has confirmed it is preparing to roll out Asperitas immersion cooling technology to more sites within its datacentre portfolio

• November 09, 2020 09 Nov'20

  IT Priorities 2020: Covid-19 accelerates cloud investments by UK IT leaders

  The updated 2020 IT Priorities Survey from Computer Weekly and TechTarget shines a light on how the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic has reshaped IT leaders’ technology investment plans

• November 03, 2020 03 Nov'20

  OVHcloud doubles down on sustainability with carbon reduction pledges

  OVHcloud emerges as the latest cloud provider to reinforce its commitment to ensuring the growth of its business does not come at the expense of the environment

• October 23, 2020 23 Oct'20

  Datacentre sustainability a work in progress in ASEAN

  Sustainability efforts have not kept pace with the growing demand for datacentre and co-location services in Southeast Asia

• October 14, 2020 14 Oct'20

  Interxion invests in growing its Austrian colocation presence with Vienna campus expansion

  Digital Realty-owned colocation giant Interxion is continuing to build out its European datacentre footprint, having acquired a parcel of land in Vienna to expand its Austrian server farm footprint

• October 14, 2020 14 Oct'20

  CyrusOne to prioritise water preservation across global colocation estate in sustainability push

  Global colocation giant makes good on its promise to publish first sustainability report into its operations, which contains commitments to curb the amount of water its facilities consume locally