🌱 Green News #209: Breaking Down Data Center Silos 🤝
SILO aims to define a common data model to help operators, vendors, and software teams reduce integration complexity and improve energy efficiency across the whole site.
Applications are open to practitioners interested in shaping the SILO specification. Apply by November 6.
🌟 Immediate Actions to Scale Green Software 🌟
🎙️ Latest Resources and Perspectives 📝
Listen TWiGS: The Carbon Cost of Research Computing: Dr. Nick Souter (University of Sussex) explains how removing unnecessary steps from research pipelines can cut emissions by around 50%.
Read Shifting AI’s Trajectory: Boris Gamazaychikov shares recent work and goals of Sustainable AI Group, GSF’s newest member.
Read RADIANCE+: Researchers introduce a proof-of-concept web app that rates a software design’s expected energy use before coding begins.
Read Carbon as a First-Class Signal: Diana Todea shares how GSF’s SCI for OpenTelemetry work aims to bring carbon into observability, and the three use cases identified so far.
Read “The Low-Carbon Transition Is a Strategic Economic Opportunity,” Say Climate CEOs Ahead of COP31: The open letter calls for faster action, including powering AI with low-carbon energy.
Read Efficient Chips Cannot Save Inefficient Software: Abhijit Sunil (Forrester) explores how software sustainability can become a core engineering metric, starting with GSF’s SCI.
Read We Have the Pieces. Now Someone Has to Orchestrate: Anna Lerner Nesbitt argues the climate field has more data, capital, and tech than ever, but needs better coordination.
Discover View and Analyze Emission Data with Carbon Optimization in Azure: A recently updated quickstart guide to track Azure emissions by resource and region, and find idle resources to cut.
Discover We Open Source Our CO₂ Emissions: Berget AI open sources a method for estimating emissions of an AI request and calls on providers to report it in every response.
Watch Experiments in Decarbonizing Digital Services: James Chudley talks about how digital teams can benchmark and decarbonize user journeys using familiar UX tools.
🌱 Events & Trainings 🌱
Green Agentic AI with Headroom (November 3 at 6:30 pm CET · Karlsruhe · Hybrid): Join Tejas Chopra to learn how trimming the context AI agents send can cut compute per task.
Cloud Native Sustainability Month: Barcelona Edition (November 3 at 6:30 pm CET · Barcelona): Join community lightning talks on sustainability in cloud native and open source.
Opening the Black Box (November 4 at 6:00 pm CET · Virtual): Learn how the Sustainable AI Group’s CLEER method estimates emissions from closed AI models, and how Etsy adopted it.
NetDRIVE Autumn Gathering 2026 (November 4–6 · Bristol): Attend a three-day gathering focused on sustainable digital research infrastructure.
Cooling Without Compromise (November 5 at 4:00 pm CET · Virtual): Operators, energy experts, and academics explore engineering choices determining how AI can scale sustainably.
Data Center Dilemmas (November 11 at 6:00 pm GMT · Bristol): Join Friends of the Earth and University of Exeter speakers discussing AI data centers’ impacts and the case for transparency.
Applying Systems Thinking to Map the Reality of Unsustainable Tech (November 12 at 5:00 pm CET · Virtual): Join ClimateAction.Tech members to explore the root causes of unsustainable tech.
Code Green Meetup (November 17 at 6:30 pm GMT · London): Join peers to review GSF’s Green Software Practitioner training, ahead of taking the certification.
Old Phones, New Cloud (November 18 at 6:00 pm CET · 's-Hertogenbosch): Join a hackathon to turn old smartphones into a lightweight Kubernetes cluster.
Environmental Impacts of AI (November 19 at 2:00 pm CET · Virtual): Explore the current standards on measuring AI’s environmental impacts in Green Web Foundation’s session.
GSF Courses: Join over 130,000 practitioners and learn how to build, measure, and scale green software.
⚡ News ⚡
Turkey Launches AI Initiative Ahead of COP31: The Antalya Pledge aims to commit countries to align AI infrastructure with climate goals, with a call for energy transparency.
Three Dormant US Nuclear Reactors Are Being Restarted to Power AI Data Centers: The US wants to reopen former nuclear plants to support its AI ambitions.
How Much Water Does a ChatGPT Prompt Really Use?: Per-prompt estimates vary widely, but a bigger concern is AI’s growing water demand, especially in water-scarce regions.
