Columbia and IBM Partner to Make Powerful Computing Sustainable Amid Energy-Hungry AI Demand

While data science research has opened many promising avenues to help humanity address and adapt to climate change, data centers – the structures that house servers  – are energy-hungry themselves, consuming approximately 2 percent of U.S. energy supplies according to the Department of Energy, and their appetite is growing swiftly.

To stave off the looming energy crisis, longstanding collaborators IBM and Columbia, are partnering on four separate research projects to make data centers more efficient. Tamar Eilam, IBM’s Chief Scientist for Sustainable Computing, who is Principal Investigator on the Columbia-IBM Sustainable Computing Initiative, and Clifford Stein, Interim Director of the Data Science Institute and Wai T. Chang Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research and Professor of Computer Science, discuss the issue and how they have partnered to address it.