BT Carbon Dashboard: Tracking AI Data Centre Sustainability

Leading UK-headquartered telco BT Group is eager to help customers reduce carbon emissions from intense artificial intelligence (AI) workloads.

The company has expanded its Carbon Network Dashboard to show how workloads and apps, which includes AI, impact carbon emissions from customer networks and data centres. Such an offering is designed to give BT’s business customers a greater level of visibility of their electricity consumption and carbon emissions at an individual workload and application level.

These insights will enable businesses to better optimise their data centre and network infrastructure to manage emissions. This comes at a critical time for the data centre industry, which is currently seeking new ways to adopt AI at a large scale, whilst trying to reduce environmental impact. 

Updating network design to support AI

This is not the first time BT has supported data centre solutions. In 2023, the telco commenced groundbreaking trials of liquid cooling technologies across its networks to enhance energy efficiency and reduce consumption.

The decision was made as part of a larger commitment from BT to achieve net zero status. With 90% of BT’s overall energy consumption coming from its networks, it is easy to see why the telco continues to invest in sustainable strategies to reduce its emissions.

Its Carbon Network Dashboard already offers a single end-to-end, near real-time view of how much electricity a customer’s network and data centre infrastructure is using. However, the offering has been updated to tie the consumption insights to traffic patterns caused by individual applications, which includes AI.

Its new capabilities are part of the latest NetFlow plug-in for the Carbon Network Dashboard, which will be able to identify traffic going to colocation or public cloud services in the future. As a result, the Dashboard will be able to prioritise what customers should focus on for optimisation, which includes re-designing for extra or flexible capacity. 

According to BT, this will ensure network devices are running within their design limits, efficiently and with flexibility to accommodate growth of AI workloads.

“BT is committed to helping customers innovate to achieve sustainable growth,” says Sarwar Khan, Sustainability Director, Business at BT. “With our Carbon Network Dashboard, we can help them adopt AI at scale while optimising their infrastructure to achieve their decarbonisation goals. It’s a great example of how BT has their back.”

Responsible data centre development

AI is already having a significant impact on the data centre industry. In recent research, McKinsey finds that data centre power consumption in Europe alone will surge from 62 TWh to more than 150 TWh by 2030.

Such an increase will be driven by AI advancements and increased digitisation, the firm says. As a result, operators are fighting to keep increased power consumption down.

BT notes that AI can have significantly different impacts on networks and data centres than other application types. For instance, it can cause sharp and unpredictable increases in bandwidth demand, which in turn causes spikes in power use by infrastructure traditionally designed for predictable workloads. 

If spikes in demand overload individual network devices or servers, this will not only impact performance but cause them to overheat and therefore waste electricity. This inevitably creates additional challenges for customers aiming to reduce emissions.

Sarwar Khan adds: “AI has incredible potential but if not deployed thoughtfully could place unpredictable demands on customers’ digital infrastructure causing surges in electricity use and carbon emissions.”

To mitigate this increase, BT’s Dashboard now incorporates electricity consumption data from a wider range of world-leading network equipment vendors and types of devices. This includes SD-WAN equipment, servers and WAN and LAN devices.

Its energy optimisation tools have also been expanded. They now include: V-App IoT builder integration for energy management of wireless access points, zero-touch automation to enable/disable power over ethernet (PoE) ports when not in use for energy management and carbon savings and sustainable device refresh recommendations for end-of-life devices.

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