Sustainability goals and efforts are starting to hit some headwinds in the world. In the United States the Trump administration has yet again pulled out of the Paris agreement, and has a campaign promise of “Drill baby, drill!”.
However, the United States is not alone in the challenges of keeping up with the Paris accord. On February 1, Bloomberg Green reported that 7 of 10 of the world’s largest economies failed to submit an emissions cutting plan report to the United Nations. 170 nations have not yet submitted nationally determined sustainability contributions. New Zealand, Russia and Argentina are reported to also be pulling out of the Paris agreement. Fortunately, some countries like the UK are continuing to work to achieve their agreed upon goals. But where does this leave the microelectronics industry from a sustainability and climate impact perspective?
The AI goldrush is putting a significant strain on companies developing and implementing AI, while they are attempting to be as green as possible, natural gas will likely be implemented to power a significant number of these datacenters, as solar, and nuclear power eventually get established to power these facilities. (Windpower is on hold during the Trump administration).
There is hope that models like DeepSeek will help to reduce the amount of power needed to train models, and that when inference becomes the driving force in AI, the need for Gigawatts of power might slow. In the meantime, companies will need to decide how important climate change is to them from a business and a public perception standpoint.
Fortunately for our readers, SEMI is still extremely active in the sustainability space with its Semiconductor Climate Consortia. At ISS, Ajit Manocha mentioned both sustainability as well as environmental health and safety as two of the three key components to be discussed at the SEMI International Policy Summits (SIPS) that will be held throughout the regions in 2025.
The Climate Summit will be in Singapore on July 7 and 8 of 2025. In 2024 the majority of companies in the semiconductor industry remained committed to sustainability. Intel is expecting to be net zero by 2040, and ST Microelectronics is expecting to be carbon neutral by 2027. Most of the industry is targeting net zero between 2040 and 2050.
Meeting Data Center Sustainability Goals: A Case Study
At ISS this year, Alyson Freeman, Innovation Lead, Sustainability and ESG at Dell Technologies, presented what Dell Technologies is doing to meet their sustainability goals. Dr. Freeman discussed how a company needs to embed sustainability in its overall IT lifecycle. First gaining insight to sustainability looking at cost efficiency and how to create innovative solutions by using available data. Then looking at how to lower the energy consumption of the systems by developing systems that use lower energy and as a result have lower cooling costs. Then using circularity to determine when systems should be retired, and what materials need to be used to create more circular recyclable products.
When evaluating a product’s lifecycle, what part of the life cycle uses the most energy? In looking how to design these systems for sustainability, Dell considers energy, materials, repairability, and upgradability, and reuse and recycling, as well as the carbon cost in manufacturing and transport of the systems. In the two examples, Freeman presented Dell products carbon footprint, for a laptop 80.6% of the carbon footprint was in the manufacturing process, and 84% of the other products, a server, carbon footprint was due to use.
To assist its customers with making purchase decisions based upon carbon footprint, Dell is providing tools that enable customers to take sustainability into consideration as the company configure it’s compute requirements. To assist customers once they are up and running, Dell also provides tools that can monitor the data centers operation. The software tracks and forecasts energy and emissions enterprise-wide, automates power and thermal management in real-time using telemetry data, and identifies potential issues earlier on servers and racks helping their clients save both power and resources.
Freeman pointed out that 79% of the power used in a data center is used to either power the servers, or cool the servers. Thus, providing clients with the optimized cooling solution be it, air, immersion, or liquid is now, from a sustainability perspective, a critical part of the data center. Partnering with clients to provide assistance for cradle-to-recycle product is now a service that can assist clients to resell equipment they are phasing out, or assist in the recycling process if that equipment has reached its end of life. Dell is using a considerable amount of recycled materials in their computers, as well as packaging of products for shipment.
Freeman demonstrated that embedding sustainability into the IT industry has its challenges, she also demonstrated that Dell is managing those challenges with its customers and partners to help the IT industry do its part in reaching net zero. So as the rest of the world muddles about trying to determine their way forward on sustainability. It looks like the IT/semiconductor industry is charging ahead to net zero.
