BT enhances dashboard to monitor AI carbon emissions

BT has expanded its Carbon Network Dashboard to provide business customers with detailed insights into the carbon emissions and electricity consumption associated with their network and data-centre workloads, particularly focusing on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) applications.

The updated Carbon Network Dashboard enables businesses to monitor the electricity consumption and carbon footprint at the level of individual workloads and applications. This improved visibility allows customers to optimise their data-centre and network infrastructure as they start implementing AI applications on a larger scale.

AI differs significantly from other types of applications, often resulting in unexpected increases in bandwidth demand. These surges can lead to higher power usage in infrastructure not originally designed to handle such unpredictable workloads. If these demands exceed the capacity of network devices or servers, it can lead to overheating and electrical waste, posing additional challenges for businesses trying to reduce their carbon emissions.

The Carbon Network Dashboard already provides an end-to-end, near real-time view of the electricity used by a customer's network and data-centre infrastructure. Now, it can correlate this consumption with traffic patterns induced by specific applications, including those driven by AI technologies.

BT offers a sustainable network design and refresh service that utilises the insights from the dashboard to help businesses adapt. This can involve altering network design, capacity, and management or optimising applications and AI workloads. BT also aids in the development of distributed architectures, which decentralise components of AI, bringing them closer to users, devices, and machines.

These enhancements are part of the latest NetFlow plug-in for the Carbon Network Dashboard. In future updates, the dashboard aims to identify traffic directed toward colocation or public cloud services, pinpointing areas for optimisation. This includes redesigning for additional or flexible capacity, ensuring network devices operate within their intended parameters, efficiently handling the growth in AI workloads.

The dashboard now includes electricity consumption data from a broader range of reputable network equipment vendors and device types, covering SD-WAN equipment, servers, and WAN and LAN devices. Its energy optimisation tools have also been expanded to include V-App IoT builder integration for energy management of wireless access points, zero-touch automation for managing power over ethernet (PoE) ports, and sustainable device refresh recommendations for end-of-life hardware.

"AI has incredible potential but if not deployed thoughtfully could place unpredictable demands on customers' digital infrastructure causing surges in electricity use and carbon emissions," said Sarwar Khan, Sustainability Director, Business, BT. "BT is committed to helping customers innovate to achieve sustainable growth. With our Carbon Network Dashboard, we can help them adopt AI at scale while optimising their infrastructure to achieve their decarbonisation goals. It's a great example of how BT has their back."