WEKA Introduces Sustainable AI Initiative
WekaIO (WEKA), which offers a data platform for performance-intensive workloads, announced the launch of its new Sustainable AI Initiative.
The Sustainable AI Initiative by WEKA seeks to address the significant increase in global data centre energy consumption and carbon emissions driven by advanced computing technologies such as AI (artificial intelligence), ML (machine learning), and HPC (high-performance computing). While these technologies play a crucial role in research and innovation, their application unintentionally contributes to the acceleration of the world's climate and energy crises.
WEKA's Sustainable AI Initiative aims to invest in climate-positive measures, facilitate industry and societal discussions, and collaborate with global leaders in politics, science, business, and technology to promote the efficient and sustainable use of AI.
As part of its initial effort, the company will collaborate with One Tree Planted to support its worldwide reforestation projects, which contribute to decarbonisation and combat the negative effects of climate change. WEKA intends to introduce more programs over the next several months.
The rapid development of AI, ML, and HPC has propelled digital transformation and advanced insights. These advanced technologies have facilitated modern research, discoveries, and scientific advancements, providing the immense potential to address ecological, humanitarian, and business challenges, including climate and energy crises. However, these technologies' high power and performance requirements have contributed to the significant increase in global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
Moreover, GPUs (graphical processing units), crucial for running and training AI models, require a continuous stream of data to perform optimally. However, studies have shown that GPUs are often idle, waiting for data due to latency and bottlenecks in the data pipeline, leading to extended processing times.
This poses a significant sustainability challenge, as data centres alone consume at least 3% of the world's energy supply each year. Additionally, AI's computational overhead has doubled every few months over the past decade, leading to an explosion in energy consumption.
“The public discourse around the benefits and ethics of AI has been robust and prolific, but rarely, if ever, does it touch on AI’s environmental impact. It’s time to change that,” said Jonathan Martin, president at WEKA. “Our planet is experiencing severe distress. If we do not quickly find ways to tame AI’s insatiable energy demands and reign in its rapidly expanding carbon footprint, it will only accelerate and intensify the very problems we hoped it would help us solve.”
Source: WEKA
To learn more about WEKA’s Sustainable AI Initiative, visit www.weka.io/sustainability.
