Green IO Newsletter - July & August 2025
Building a greener digital world, one byte at a time
Hello responsible technologist!
It’s that time of year again, holidays are over and it’s back to the grindstone. But never fear, Green IO Season 4 is here with an exciting Autumn program guaranteed to ease you into the groove and put a smile on your face.
Our third edition of Green IO London conference is just weeks away, and this year’s line up surpasses even last years incredible schedule. We also have some fantastic podcasts on the hot topics of thirsty datacenters, AI efficiency and more.
Hope many of you can join is in London, and if not, you can always follow us on the usual channels. Looking forward to working together this season. Bonne rentrée!
Gaël Duez
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What’s been happening lately in the Green IO community?
🎙️ Podcast episodes
#63a “AI & Energy Efficiency: why was DeepSeek a defining moment?” with Anne Currie. Listen. [#63b to follow next week].
[Gaël’s important note on this interview] “Because of Anne‘s fresh angle on the DeepSeek moment (more a market turnpoint than a technological turnpoint), we didn’t actually discuss the claims about DeepSeek energy efficiency. I should have brought to your attention that DeepSeek uses of chain-of-thought reasoning massively increases its energy consumption during the inference phase (source: MIT Technology Review) which “offsets” its effciency gain during the training phase. More generally, and quoting Sasha Luccioni here “If we started adopting this paradigm [Ed. chain-of-thought] widely, inference energy usage would skyrocket“.
#62 “Thirsty Datacenters in the Heart of Silicon Valley” with Masheika Allgood. Listen | 5-mins read
#61 “Scaling Green Software” with Anita Schüttler. Listen | 5-mins read
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🔔 Never miss an episode!
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🎤 Green IO conferences
London, September 23rd - 24th 2025
"Good for the Planet, Good for Business?" Simple question but complex answers… and we expect a massive turnout of responsible technologists. Register here.
Paris, December 9th - 11th 2025
“Building Europe of Green IT“ is the 2025 theme of our 3rd edition. Expect the “crème de la crème” of experts and practitioners from all over Europe with many NGO participating in the brand new “NGO dedicated track”. Get an early bird ticket here and submit your talk here.
Singapore, April 14th - 15th 2026
A third edition focusing on concrete use cases in the intersection of FinOps and GreenOps. Get an early bird ticket here and submit your talk here.
New York, May 13th - 14th 2026
A second edition focusing on AI as a contested force for sustainability. Get an early bird ticket here and submit your talk here.
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Do you want to contribute to Green IO?
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# Couldn’t attend? # Listen # Watch # Read # Tools # Participate # Study # Attend
What else has popped up on our Tech & Sustainability radar?
# Couldn’t attend?… we’ve got it covered for you
A quick apology to Fiona Leibundgut, as her full name was not included in June’s Newsletter. Read Fiona’s wrap up article on Munich Green IO here and whilst you’re at it, check out Spark IT/Remission’s playbook here on Sustainable IT for Digital Startups.
# Listen… We’re all ears
François Burra talks about pivoting from Tech to Climate UX, whilst E309 of Outrage and Optimism has equal doses of both whilst exploring tipping points. E290 of Tech Won’t Save us delves into sovereignty issues and freeing the shackles of Big Tech. And don’t forget to check in on Environment Variables E114 (Real Time Carbon), E115 (Real Efficiency at Scale) E116 (LLM Energy Transparency).
# Watch… Sometimes video is worth its environmental footprint
Is history repeating itself? :- How Tech is recycling Big Tobacco’s playbook by strategically masking harmful products; and IDC & New Relic share thoughts on the European Observability market.
# Read… Our coffee-break reading this month
Building the case for Frugal Tech, Open AI’s energy efficient GPT-OSS models, the need for more transparency on AI emissions, options for GAFAM-free open source tools (FR), and the EU General Purpose AI Code of Practice will keep you busy.
The discussions on Enabled Emissions aren’t going away, neither are those on the local community impact of datacenters, whether in the US in general, Texas, France, or Europe as a whole. And Media Justice & Kairos have composed a comprehensive guide on how to fight back against massive datacenter development.
And just in case you didn’t have time to bookmark this before the summer, the Benchmarking Digital Sustainability EcoWeb Report 2025.
# Tools… Skill-up for a sustainable future
WEF Technology Convergence Report and the 3C Framework.
# Study… We’re never too old to learn
Not many people could have missed the latest report from Google on Gemini’s water and energy usage (interestingly, Mistral seems to be taking an different approach), but whilst we can applaud the efforts to measure the environmental impacts of AI, should we be more concerned about the method or lack of peer review? and the true water cost of data centers ? Check out Nathaniel Burola’s comments to get the low-down. Hopefully, the first comprehensive multi-criteria LCA of AI training - with 16 environmental impact categories - based on detailed primary data collection of the Nvidia A100 SXM 40GB GPU will help get better estimates.
Schneider has also released a White Paper on DLC system challenges and a new research paper explores how tech companies are imposing the use of AI design strategies. Plus, a decomposition framework for digital integration through product location.
And hot off the press! : Resilio in partnership with Enterprise for Society Centre (EPFL, Unil and IMD) and 20 other organizations unveils the environmental footprint of the digital sector in Switzerland. Be the first to read all about it in their white paper.
# Attend… Meet fellow responsible technologists
AI & (Environmental) Sustainability, 16 September, Karlsruhe (GER)
Climate Week NYC 2025, 21-28 September New York (USA)
AI & Big Data Expo, 24-25 September, Amsterdam (NL)
London Climate Technology Show, 1-2 October 2025, London (UK)
Green IT Day, 2-3 Oct 2025, Montpellier & Toulouse (FR)
GreenTech Forum, 4-5 Nov 2025, Paris (FR)
EcoCompute 2025, 13-14 November 2025, Berlin (DE)
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One last positive thought
Large Nature Model - The world’s first’s first open source GenAI model dedicated to nature (Dataland, Los Angeles, USA).
See you next month!
Jill TELLIER, Gaël DUEZ & the Green IO Team
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