Digital services have transformed the way we live, work, and connect—but they come with an environmental footprint that is far from negligible.

"Benchmarks have shown impacts are roughly proportional to model size: a model 10 times bigger will generate impacts one order of magnitude larger than a smaller model for the same amount of generated tokens."

"With the launch of the new tool, users will be able to track carbon emissions across an expanded range of areas, including baremetal, hosted private cloud services, and public cloud compute products."

"Integrating software and smart technology across the data centre infrastructure will boost operational effectiveness and help us all to become more efficient, resilient and sustainable."

"Eventually, one goal would be making it possible to write conformance to a standard like this into commercial agreements for new software projects – so credible claims about making software more sustainable, can be independently verified (. )"

"Water industry sources believe new data centres in the next five years could need the same amount of water as 500,000 people."

"PwC developed a simulation that models two major impacts of its adoption: The rise in energy use from increasing data centers and the corresponding drop in energy demand in other sectors due to AI-driven efficiency."

"Much of the focus on green IT concentrates on data centers and cloud computing but network infrastructure presents a significant opportunity to drive sustainability."

"One day, energy usage could be as visible as nutrition labels on food!"

"We conclude with recommendations for data centre stakeholders to align the low-carbon transition of the data centre sector with broader objectives of climate resilience, smart city development, and sustainable finance."

"Schmidt’s subsequent call for an “all energy sources” approach (. ) is a sort of call to action — namely, to develop new approaches for power generation, grid management, and energy efficiency."

"Nearly 95% of respondents are concerned about environmental impact, but only 3.3% prioritize this in their purchasing decisions."

"Lightmatter’s chip reportedly achieves 9 petaflops per watt of performance — orders of magnitude beyond conventional silicon. If such optical computing scales up, future AI models could run on a fraction of the energy today’s do."

"Fortunately, there is a way forward. One solution can be decoupling digital growth from carbon emissions through technological innovation, regulatory support and more mindful digital behavior."

"Our experiments show up to 25% increase in throughput and up to 40% reduction in energy usage at the end systems compared to baseline methods, highlighting a fair and energy-efficient way to optimize data transfers in shared network environments."

"With AI-related demand for computing power currently doubling every three to four months, and with Bitcoin mining alone consuming as much electricity as Poland, innovation is critical to ensure the technologies we need don’t deepen the climate crisis."

Let’s bend the curve.

The challenge is immense, but so is the opportunity. Let's create a digital future that benefits everyone and the planet we call home.

By improving energy use in data centers, networks, and user devices, and by adopting principles of sustainable software engineering, we can work toward a future where computing is accessible to everyone—at a fraction of today’s emissions.

As the internet and the ICT sector continue to grow at an unprecedented pace, we find ourselves on unsustainable trajectories that demand urgent attention.

While the emissions from individual activities like emails or streaming may seem small, they add up significantly when scaled across billions of users.