Green IO Newsletter - Back to school 2026

Building a greener digital world, one byte at a time

Hello responsible technologist!

Back-to-school always hits different when you're gearing up for your two biggest conferences of the year — and relaunching a podcast. Pencils sharpened, inbox reopened, no more excuses. 🎒

Quick update, because you've been asking: the podcast is back. Expect a new episode every two weeks, with sharper audio and video thanks to a full production refresh over the summer. First up: Ben Tongue and Claire Robinson. The next release lands just before Green IO London — what a coincidence. 😉

And I'm still carried by this community's support heading into the busiest stretch of the year: Green IO London on Sept. 30th and Oct. 1st, then Paris in December. Paris especially — with its European track welcoming speakers from 20+ countries — is the moment for the whole European ecosystem to gather in one place. It's why Green IO exists.

Still time to be part of it — our CFP is still open. Make sure to check out this year's theme, "Bring Tech Home: From Dependency to Sustainability".

And now, let's deep-dive into the latest news from our sustainable digital ecosystem.

Gaël

____________

What’s been happening lately in the Green IO community?

🎙️ Podcast episodes

#E80 How to build climate resilient Tech infrastructure! with Ben Tongue and Claire Robinson - Soon to be released

#E79 AI & Sustainability: follow the money! with Boris Gamazaychikov and Sasha Luccioni Watch | Listen

#E78 Can AI be applied for Sustainability? It’s complicated… with Jeremy Tamanini Watch | Listen

____________

🔔 Never miss an episode!

____________

🎤 Green IO conferences in 2026

Got something to share? We welcome inspirational talks, new research, latest use cases, new tools … CFP is still open for Green IO Paris!

London, Sept. 30^th - Oct. 1^st
“Follow the energy” is this year’s theme for the n°1 Green IT conference in the UK. The agenda is live.

Paris, Dec. 2^nd - Dec 3^rd
Big news! Green IO Paris doubles its size in 2026 with 2 tracks: an English-speaking and a brand new French-speaking one. Two languages. One mission. Join us for a truly European line-up, plus a deep dive into the French ecosystem. The call for speakers is now officially open - apply here! Early bird tickets are available here.

_____________

Do you want to volunteer at Green IO?

____________

# Couldn’t attend? # Listen # Read # Tools # Study # Participate # Attend

What else has popped up on our Tech & Sustainability radar?

Listen… We’re all ears

Two great episodes from EV TWiGS: E152 Flexibility in the Age of AI, plus E151 The AI Water Management Challenge with Masheika Allgood. You can also listen to her on our Green IO #E62 all about Silicon Valley’s thirsty datacenters.

# Watch… Sometimes video is worth its environmental footprint

The Open AI Huggling Face incident explained (Black Hat USA 2026).

Ground Truth for AI: Building the next generation of nature agents shows how traditional ecological knowledge, sensors, LiDAR and open datasets can inform trustworthy AI agents for nature and climate finance decisions.

# Read… Our coffee-break reading this month

The last day of June saw the release of Google’s 2026 Environmental report, drafted using its own AI tools (Gemini, Google NotebookLM, etc). It celebrated cutting data center energy emissions by 12% ¹, even though there was an overall electricity demand increase of 27%, driven primarily by AI. And they openly admit the difficulties in achieving their climate moonshot. Similar observations were made in Microsoft’s 2026 Environmental Sustainability report, as their total emissions (Scope 1, 2, and 3) have increased by 23.4% compared to the 2020 baseline.

A couple of neat articles, one by the GWF on how scraping and crawling by AI bots place stress on broader internet infrastructure and how these new behaviors have an impact on carbon emissions, and another by the GSF on the economics of green and efficient agentic AI. And Neuralwatt/GreenPT have released a joint statement demanding that we ‘Reverse the Order’, cut out AI waste, and build lean AI first (see also paper below on energy use of AI inference).

It was also the summer of cybersecurity malfunction disclosures, with Meta AI models hacking other companies, Claude’s hacking incidents, and Hugging Face was breached by Open AI. Fears are that current AI sandbox testing is becoming more vulnerable. Is Pandora’s box now truly open? as Dalton (a member of OpenAI’s technical staff) believes that automated attacks are a real threat. And Anthropic’s second company-wide Risk Report was released on August 14, 2026, raising the level of risk from ‘very low’ to ‘low’, due to uncertainty about AI model behavior.

Meanwhile Epson are pursued in the courts for programmed obsolescence (see also presspack in FR), and, as concerns grow about the effects of wireless communication on human health, RF Safe has put forward a proposition for a Clean Ether Act.

# Tools… Skill-up for a sustainable future

OpenCCF - A common, machine-readable structure for exchanging GHG Protocol-aligned carbon footprints between systems: open, CC0, and framework-agnostic. (Read also the White Paper ‘Towards Harmonised, Interoperable Carbon Footprint Data, which details the proposal for a shared, machine-readable data model for corporate and product carbon footprints.)

Check out the Frugal AI Switchboard to help you find smaller, more local, open, models.

# Study… We’re never too old to learn

Hard not to miss the release of this paper from Will Alpine et al : AI-driven productivity gains enable more CO₂ emissions than they avoid in a global energy–economy model.

A couple of papers on obsolescence: a recent thesis on software obsolescence and existing remediation strategies plus an analysis of OS requirement driven obsolescence.

A study on the energy cost of AI agents, another on the energy use of AI inference, efficiency pathways, and test time scaling, and one on optimized datacenter cooling infrastructures.

And two papers both analyzing the local warming effect of datacenters : as an emerging thermal hazard, plus quantifying the impact of datacenters. Plus, a pertinent study on the two water use pathways of datacenters : The Hidden Water Geography of U.S. Hyperscale Data Centers in the AI Era.

The Changing Shape of Climate Techno-fixes. Frontier technology sectors promise transformative climate solutions while entrenching the carbon economy. This perspective maps these emerging dynamics as a first step to designing governance to address them.

# Participate… One byte at a time

Hack on the Grid - Electricity Maps Hackathon, 11 September 2026.

Free ITU training course on Responsible Digital Transformation : impact assessments for AI data and Governance, Oct 6-27 2026 (online; EN).

# Attend… Meet fellow responsible technologists

Green IT Days, 10 September 2026, Montpellier (FR)

GoS Hour at #IBC2026, 11 September, Amsterdam (NED)

VivaSlowTech, 29 September 2026, Paris (FR)

Green IO London, 30 September - 01 Oct 2026 London (UK)

SF Tech Week, 5–11 October 2026, San Francisco (USA)

SuSI Summit, 7 October 2026, Munich (DE)

_____________

Was this email forwarded to you?

____________

One last positive thought!

This month there are two 😀 :

• CrankGPT, a fully offline, off-the-grid AI box from squeez labs;

• Cooling datacenters with pee.🧻

See you next month!
Jill TELLIER, Gaël DUEZ & the Green IO Team