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BEYOND THE AI HYPE: INEFFICIENCY IS THE REAL IT SUSTAINABILITY CHALLENGE
Alois Reitbauer, Chief Strategist, Dynatrace explores the conversation around why sustainability is fixated on AI, ignoring other systemic factors within IT that are causing far greater environmental damage.
As the UK aims to expand AI computing capacity and build new data centres to achieve a 20-fold increase in sovereign compute by 2030, AI faces increasing scrutiny for its heavy resource use and emissions. The need for large amounts of computational power to train and subsequently run large models cannot be ignored, but the broader IT sustainability conversation is disproportionately focused on AI, even as other systemic factors in IT pose a greater environmental burden. The truth is that the broader IT ecosystem is still riddled with inefficiencies. Idle servers, short hardware lifecycles and a lack of visibility into infrastructure waste are persistent challenges hindering sustainability initiatives. AI may be in the spotlight as the most attention-grabbing technology, but rather than being the main culprit, it should be the catalyst that drives a wider reassessment of IT resource efficiency.
IT infrastructure hindering sustainability
AI has brought longstanding inefficiencies and hidden infrastructure costs into sharper focus, something organisations should treat as a catalyst for action, not a crisis. Globally, the real opportunity lies in optimising what we are already operating.
One of the most overlooked issues in data centre energy efficiency is the prevalence of idle or‘ zombie’ servers – machines that remain powered on while performing little to no useful work. According to a 2024 report by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, even when idle, conventional servers can consume between 27 % and 36 % of their maximum power. These servers may appear functional but deliver no meaningful computing output,
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