Google’s next environmental goal after committing to being carbon-free 24/7 worldwide by 2030 is focused on water and replenishing more of it than its offices and data centers use.
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Google has a 2030 goal to use carbon-free electricity around the clock, and it’s now working to achieve that by switching its Belgium data center away from backup diesel generators to batteries.
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Managing infrastructure for services with billions of users is already challenging without work from home-related traffic surges. As Google recently discovered, grazing cows are apparently something else to keep an eye on when trying to prevent network outages.
Google has been purchasing 100% renewable energy for the past three years, with the end goal of having its data centers be 24×7 carbon-free. To achieve this, the company is implementing a carbon-intelligent computing platform that factors processing urgency and how much solar/wind energy is available.
After announcing the biggest corporate renewable energy purchase yesterday, Google today detailed more infrastructure spending. Over the next two years, Google will invest €3 billion to expand its European data centers.
Google this year announced that it is spending $13 billion on new or expanded offices and data centers in the United States. The latest site is in Nevada, with Google breaking ground today on a new data center and Cloud region.
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The goal of a “circular economy” is to minimize waste and maximize the use of finite resources. Google is now setting out to apply this economic system to its operations, products, and supply chains with the “Circular Google” initiative.
For the second year in a row, Google in February detailed a $13 billion investment in new or expanded U.S. offices and data centers. The company this week made “big moves” related to that effort in Michigan, Oklahoma, and Texas.
For 2017, Google was able to purchase enough renewable energy to match its global usage. The company reached that goal again in 2018, thus making it the “first organization of [its] size to achieve 100 percent renewable energy two years running.”
The past week in big tech criticism has been centered around Amazon’s pull out of New York for its HQ2 after local complaints over tax breaks. A new report today looks at Google’s use of non-disclosure agreements when building out data centers around the U.S.
At the start of last year, Google detailed plans for new or expanded offices and data centers in 14 states across the country. Sundar Pichai today announced another U.S. expansion to the tune of $13 billion throughout 2019.
In Android 9 Pie, Alphabet’s DeepMind division is responsible for machine learning features like Adaptive Battery and Brightness. One of the first collaborations between the two companies was an AI system tasked with increasing energy efficiency at Google’s data centers. Two years later, an AI has been granted direct control over cooling these servers.
Google is rapidly growing its global infrastructure after just announcing its first private trans-Atlantic fiber cable earlier this month. The latest expansion involves a new data center in Singapore to serve the Southeast Asia region.
Earlier this year, Google announced an expansion of its U.S. offices and data centers. The cloud facilities are often touted by the company as helping the surrounding community with a new report today quantifying the exact economic contributions made when Google builds a data center.
Just last week, Google announced that it purchased enough renewable energy in 2017 to match global usage from its data center and offices. Today, it is purchasing a significant amount of solar power for its Georgia cloud facility, while also breaking ground on a new site in Alabama.
As Google noted during its Q4 2017 earnings call earlier this month, the company is planning on hiring thousands of more people in 2018, which will require office and data center expansion. The company further detailed those U.S. plans today as it breaks ground on its first of several new facilities.
Very few people are allowed inside one of Google’s data centers, but you can at least take a virtual tour thanks to a 360° video. We should warn that the narration is basically just one extended plug for the company’s technology, but it’s fun to take a look around.
The 360° view is available on both mobile and desktop platforms …
Google has been using artificial intelligence for a wide range of tasks, ranging from delivering search results to speech recognition, so perhaps it should come as no surprise that Google’s latest AI product was figuring out how to improve the energy efficiency of the very servers used to do all that other stuff.
A Google blog entry spotted by Engadget describes how a Google engineer used his 20 percent time to apply machine learning to predict the real-time energy efficiency of its data centers. Google uses a measure known as Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE): a ratio of total power used to power actually used for computing. In simple terms, if cooling used as much power as computing, the PUE would be 2. The closer to 1 Google can get, the more efficient the energy usage.
Google has already got its PUE down to 1.12 – about twice as efficient as a typical data center – but is using the AI project to try to further reduce the number. By using machine learning to predict the impact of variables like outside air temperature, Google can tweak the setup to minimize power usage.
The days of self-aware machines grow ever closer …
If it feels like a lot of major corporations are going green, it could have something to do with today being Earth Day and of course Google is joining in on the eco-friendly festivities. Sure, the company is fighting poachers and helping nonprofit organizations, but what about its own backyard? Earlier today, the folks in Mountain View announced a new deal with MidAmerican Energy that will supply its Iowa data center with up to 407 megawatts of 100 percent renewable wind energy.
