At Lenovo, Earth Day is a time to reflect on our efforts to make our products, services and operations more sustainable. We take a collaborative approach, focusing on holistic improvements and innovations that push us further on our sustainability journey. But often, the way our innovations are used by our customers is more inspiring than their development. This Earth Day, I’m proud to share the stories of two customers using Lenovo’s infrastructure solutions to innovate while driving progress in their own sustainability journeys. As AI fuels innovation opportunities for organizations globally, today’s businesses are evolving their IT infrastructure to manufacture intelligence at scale, transforming raw data into real-time insights that accelerate powerful transformation. In order to turn AI into a long-term reality that enables more opportunities for good, the systems that enable AI must meet stringent performance and scalability data requirements, balancing AI’s power with environmental responsibility.
Lenovo is at the forefront of addressing these challenges, forging innovation with sustainability. Recently, Mary Jacques, Executive Director of Global ESG and Regulatory Compliance at Lenovo and Scott Tease, Vice President and General Manager of our Infrastructure Solutions Group’s Product Line, discussed Lenovo’s efforts to align its technology with environmental, social, and governance priorities.
Noting that AI’s use comes with an energy-intensive footprint, Tease shared that the data centers powering AI consume vast amounts of electricity and that cooling them is also energy-intensive.
“In fact, about 40% of the power bill in a data center goes to air conditioning. You’ve got something that’s already taking up a lot of power, and the resulting heat is going to cost you 40% more to air cool. That’s where we’re focusing – rethinking how that data center works, doing away with traditional air conditioning, and replacing it with liquid cooling,” Tease said.
Innovative solutions like Lenovo Neptune, a liquid cooling system designed to slash energy consumption, uses water to carry heat away from the server, saving 30% or more on energy bills.
With Lenovo Neptune, Italy’s Largest University Supercomputer Becomes More Sustainable
Elsewhere, the installation of a Lenovo High Performance Computing system and the use of Lenovo Neptune liquid cooling technology, is reducing energy consumption by up to 40% while accelerating research activities for the University of Pisa.
UniPi has a leading position in the development of digitization processes, which are increasingly strategic for training, research and technology transfer. Thanks to the expansion of the supercomputer, UniPi is getting an additional boost to explore cutting-edge topics such as 5G, AI and quantum computing.
The Lenovo HPC system installed in the UniPi data center consists of 16 SD650 V3 nodes with two Intel® Xeon® Max 9480 CPUs, the first x86 processor with high-bandwidth memory (HBM). The solution also ensures better energy efficiency, compared to similar air-cooled solutions. The use of Lenovo Neptune™ Direct Water-Cooling water technology, in fact, is able to capture up to 98% of the heat produced by the supercomputer and liquid cooling saves the energy used for the fans and also, thanks to the greater efficiency, the temperature of the CPUs does not reach critical values, avoiding the reduction of the maximum frequency of the cores.
Unlocking the Full Potential of Data with Efficient Performance
With the explosion of data from personal devices and business technology globally, today’s organizations need computing architectures that can keep up. Lenovo is focused on building an AI architecture that addresses this with better efficiency, performance and scalability for a responsible future.
Lenovo is revolutionizing AI access with a network of best-in-class partners that deliver AI-optimized services using three main ingredients: cutting edge storage and data hardware with state-of-the-art AI accelerators, reliable high-speed networking, and an optimized AI orchestration layer to bring everything together under a simple and intuitive interface. Working together, Lenovo, AMD, and Nokia, are enabling hyperscaler, Nscale to make AI accessible and scalable by offering GPU as-a-service through their environmentally conscious infrastructure.
As AI keeps booming, the quickly evolving technology is disrupting aspects of every industry. Generative AI extends far beyond simple content generation with applications in diverse fields like customer services, healthcare, fraud detection and security, and so many more. But, as the capabilities of AI technology continue to grow, so do the infrastructure requirements needed to implement it.
Nscale’s data center operations in Norway house thousands of GPUs inside a network of Lenovo ThinkSystem servers specifically tailored for the hyperscaler. The strategic location in the Arctic Circle allows Nscale to leverage the local climate for energy efficient adiabatic cooling complimented by use of 100 percent renewable energy and Lenovo Neptune warm water cooling to help reduce energy costs while maintaining performance.
Through its cloud platform, strategically placed data centers, and powerful GPU node clusters, Nscale is already offering turnkey AI development and deployment to companies around the world.
By aligning technological advancements with ESG goals, Lenovo is setting a standard for how businesses can innovate responsibly in an era of constant change.
Through solutions like Neptune, Lenovo is showing that it is possible to have technology and sustainability go hand in hand.