Electricity and automation company Schneider Electric has set a goal of reducing the carbon intensity of its top 1 000 suppliers by 50% by 2025, Schneider Electric strategy and sustainability senior VP Aparna Prabhakar said this week.

The company created its Sustainability Impact Programme to empower its supply chain to be part of the sustainability journey. The carbon intensity of its top 1 000 suppliers had already dropped by 38%, which meant they were on track to meet the 2025 goal, she said during a briefing on the company's AI-ready data centre solutions on December 4.

The company uses its own sustainability consulting to help suppliers decarbonise by engaging with them around goal setting, emissions assessments, education and progress tracking.

"Such industry-first programmes set the stage for the decoupling of AI's growth from energy consumption," she said.

Further, since 2018, Schneider Electric has avoided 550-million tons of CO₂ emissions, which is equivalent to taking 100-million cars off the road for one year. This resulted in it being named the most sustainable company by Time Magazine and data analysis and visualisation company Statista in June.

The decoupling of the growth of AI-ready data centres and AI workloads from energy consumption was important because the company predicted that 100 GW to 150 GW of new data centres would be built over the next five years, of which 60% would be dedicated to AI, said Schneider Electric senior VP and CTO Jim Simonelli.

"The challenge is adapting data centre designs to accommodate these new workloads," he said.

Further, about 25% of the new AI-ready data centre workloads will be used to train large language models (LLMs) on the associated patterns and context to create the core LLMs that will be used for inference in the augmenting solutions for enterprises.

However, Schneider Electric was seeing ultrahigh-density designs for LLM training, well above 100 kW per rack, and this was driving much of the change in the data centre industry and in the company's solutions, he noted.

Owing to the intense energy demands of AI, the company was now seeing data centre campuses of 300 MW or larger, and expected new campuses to reach 1 GW, 3 GW or even 5 GW in size, said Schneider Electric VP and chief data centre and AI advocate Steven Carlini.

"The growth of data centres is far outpacing utility growth, which means sourcing power for electricity grids becomes more challenging. Grids are under unprecedented pressure globally."

Schneider Electric is supporting decarbonisation of data centres by providing power sourcing services.

For example, its work on an energy procurement contract and power purchase agreement for digital infrastructure company Equinix enabled the company to save $24-million and reduced its emissions by 24% despite a 43% increase in energy use during the year, he said.

Additionally, Schneider Electric is also providing on-site power generation solutions that can include wind, solar, gas turbines and hydrogen fuel cells. It also offers on-site power generation as a services model, to enable data centres to save on upfront capital expenditure.

"At this intersection of AI advancement and the energy evolution, we must recognise that power is more than just a utility; it is the foundation of the digital future," Carlini said.

The recent surge in demand for AI was taking the data centre industry's sustainability goals off course, and the industry had yet to decouple AI data centre growth from energy consumption, and thereby making sustainability targets significantly more difficult to reach, said Prabhakar.

AI was double-edged sword because it driove efficiencies in businesses and increased productivity, but AI workloads required far more power and cooling to operate than conventional IT workloads, leading to a spike in energy use and emissions, she said.

Therefore, the industry must explore tactics to mitigate the impact of AI growth, and must rebuild its sustainability strategies, as its Scope 3 emissions had grown exponentially and there were new requirements that companies must report on, she noted.

"In driving an industry-wide shift, sustainability must be the first consideration in every product and project," she emphasised.

To drive lasting change to address the energy consumption changes of the industry, all stakeholders and partners must drive innovation in the data centre market for efficiency and sustainability, said Schneider Electric Data Centres and Networks business executive VP Pankaj Sharma.

"[Global organisation] The International Energy Agency expects global data centre power demand to double between 2022 and 2026, and data centres are striving to remain on track with sustainability requirements and targets in the face of AI energy needs," he said.

The projected trajectory of data centre energy consumption showed a strong upward curve, and the industry and its partners must find a way to bend this energy curve to reduce energy consumption, he said.

"We must scale quickly to seize AI opportunities while remaining sustainable. Therefore, the industry must commit to using efficient products and maximise the use of AI applications for sustainability," he said.

Meanwhile, Schneider Electric also announced that it had acquired liquid cooling and thermal management company Motivair, because liquid cooling was the future of AI data centres, Sharma said.

"We have also invested in supporting our sustainable data centre solutions over the next three years to ensure that we are a reliable part to quickly deploy solutions for customers around the globe," he added.