IBM has expanded its sustainability portfolio with the launch of its IBM Cloud Carbon Calculator, which aims to help enterprises track greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across cloud services and advance their sustainability performance throughout their multi-cloud journeys.
The IBM Cloud Carbon Calculator is an AI-informed dashboard that can help clients access emissions data across a variety of IBM Cloud workloads such as AI, high-performance computing and financial services.
According to a recent study by IBM, CEOs are facing pressure to adopt generative AI while also weighing the data management needs to make AI successful. The increase in data processing required for AI workloads can present new challenges for organizations that are looking to reduce their GHG emissions. With more than 43 percent of CEOs surveyed already using generative AI to inform strategic decisions, organizations should arguably prepare to balance executing high performance workloads with sustainability.
To help clients respond to these challenges, the IBM Cloud Carbon Calculator can quickly spot patterns, anomalies and outliers in data that are potentially associated with higher GHG emissions. Based on technology from IBM research and its collaboration with Intel, the tool uses ML and advanced algorithms to help organizations uncover emissions hot spots and provide them with the insights to inform their emissions mitigation strategy.
In an interview with ERP Today, Briana Frank, vice president of product and design, cross portfolio, IBM Cloud, said: “We strive to meet our clients wherever they are at on their journey and understand the growing priority to implement sustainability into business practices. In fact (our study has) found 42 percent of CEOs surveyed pinpoint environmental sustainability as their top challenge over the next three years.
“With the IBM Cloud Carbon Calculator, we’re empowering clients with the insights they need to make informed decisions about their emissions mitigation strategy – which is especially critical as emissions reporting become more commonplace worldwide. The availability of the tool is the latest milestone in our commitment to helping clients turn sustainability ambition into action, and follows our recent opening of the Madrid Multizone Region earlier this month – which runs on 100 percent renewable electricity.
“For IBM, reducing environmental impact to help create a more sustainable future is a top priority and we will continue to help clients on their journeys to achieve both their sustainability and business goals.”
When asked about what’s next for IBM Cloud Carbon Calculator, Frank said: “In the coming months, we’ll continue to add service coverage quarterly, enabling clients to leverage IBM Cloud Carbon Calculator across more IBM Cloud services. It’s also important to note that as companies embrace hybrid cloud, we fundamentally believe that practices to support sustainability not only have quantifiable benefits directly for organizations, but they also favorably position a company to their clients and investors and attract talent.
“To help organizations on these goals, IBM Cloud and IBM Research will continue to work closely with our partner communities to execute programs and activities aimed at helping clients reduce compute-related GHG emissions and increase overall energy efficiency.”
