Decarbonising compute: a power of good

Decarbonising the telecoms industry and its supply chain is a full-stack initiative, meaning all the layers that go into compute, network operations and services usage. Over the last two years, much of the attention on sustainability has focused on how to improve the energy efficiency of networks, and for good reason given that networks account for 90% of operator energy usage and underpin virtually all global internet traffic.

The compute portion of the stack, however, has garnered less visibility, a fact that belies its importance considering the network and cloud infrastructure it powers, which collectively make up 2–3% of global energy use. This report serves as part of a broader research partnership with Arm to understand how best to decarbonise compute, how this can be achieved and why this matters for the ICT industry.