@HPCpodcast: Former AWS Sustainability VP on the State of Decarbonization in HPC and IT

The growing imperative of ESG- and carbon-related issues in the HPC industry – and in IT generally – is the topic of this week’s @HPCpodcast episode (sponsored by Lenovo). Shahin and Doug speak with Adrian Cockcroft, an analyst colleague of Shahin’s at OrionX and former vice president of sustainability architecture at Amazon Web Services, where he helped customers apply sustainability practices to their businesses. The good news shared by Adrian is that Big Tech companies and IT in general are decarbonizing more effectively than had been expected a few years ago. Even as systems become denser and hotter, data centers increasingly are adopting renewable energy sources, liquid cooling and other measures that reduce usage of carbon-based energy sources. He tells us that on a per-watts basis, the IT industry has plateaued – though, of course, total watts consumed continues to climb.

Interview: Adrian Cockcroft on What Matters for Startups

“Broadly speaking, Battery invests globally in cutting-edge, category-defining businesses in markets including enterprise IT, software and services, e-commerce, digital media and industrial technologies. And we invest at every stage of a company’s lifecycle from seed to buyout. From there, we are looking for big markets. Entrepreneurs who are building a great team and attacking a huge market opportunity are always of interest to us. We are also watching the tectonic shifts brought on by trends like cloud computing, big data and mobile, and working to identify the companies that are taking advantage of those trends to help define, or in many cases re-define, industries.”