C A S E S T U D Y

numbers and they align with what we ' re already doing or planning on campus. So, it was a good match.

Helmholtz Munich researches how climate change affects human health. How do you respond to the widely reported environmental concerns around data centres?

It ' s a real concern. The amount of compute we use across the Helmholtz association is tiny compared to the hyperscalers and neoscalers, but the scale of AI expansion raises a genuine question about what it ' s worth to humankind. Internally, I ' ve been questioning whether we should have something like an ethics committee for AI jobs. They consume so much electricity and produce so much heat that, as with animal experiments, perhaps you should have to justify how many GPU hours you require and why it ' s necessary. A committee could then approve or reject.

What advice would you give to those research institutions who are hesitant to build and run their own HPC clusters?

It depends why they ' re hesitant. Typically, it comes down to investment and complexity, rather than environmental concerns. In Germany, if you run the numbers on total cost

of ownership, there ' s a clear benefit to owning your own hardware compared to the cloud, except when it comes to the building. We expected building our own facility to pay off after 10 years or so, but even after 20 years, renting space was still more cost-effective. It was a very clear business case. �

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