June 2025 Newsletter
Hi all,
Welcome to the first monthly digest of the ESCS Community! We thank you for your patience as it took some time to get things up and running on our side. We’re catching up and excited to roll this out on a monthly basis.
This newsletter aims to be a round up of interesting news and developments in the sustainable computing space. The concept is simple: whenever we come across an interesting news item or publication on the topic, we will post it on the forum (e.g. in the news category) so that everyone can jump in and discuss it; but of course, this is a collaborative effort and you are all encouraged to share what catches your eye! At the end of each month, we will send out this monthly digest of the articles shared and of the discussions that happened on the forum.
Disclaimer: In case you got things mixed up, this is not the Green DiSC newsletter. If you’re interested in the open-access sustainability certification scheme for digital research, you can subscribe there.
Let’s dive in: what’s new in green compute? 🌱 📰
Starting with just a few items before the summer…
- “…it’s likely that our AI footprint today is the smallest it will ever be.” MIT Tech Review’s overview of AI’s environmental footprint sheds light on the impact of the biggest models today and makes the case for more (and better) disclosures from companies [link, ESCS forum post]
- In the US, the EPA released a new 50-hour rule, allowing back up generators in data centres — which mostly use fossil fuel — to operate for up to 50 hours a year [EPA article, LinkedIn post discussing it]
- Training a model equates to the emissions of five cars; using ChatGPT is 10x more energy intensive than Googling; we can reduce global emissions by 10% with AI. How (in)accurate are these numbers? Sasha Luccioni, Boris Gamazaychikov, Theo Alves da Costa, and Emma Strubell look into misinformation surrounding the environmental sustainability of AI and how we can do better [link to paper, ESCS forum post]
And we will be back with more next month!
Don’t forget to post! 🗣️
We’re keen to build the ESCS community further so if you have news or resources to share, burning questions, or just want to learn from others, we invite you to start discussions or join in on the ESCS Community Forum.
Our new Community Manager, Anica, will be on the look out for discussion highlights and your forum post might just be featured in our next newsletter!
Any feedback or suggestion? Send us a message at contact@escs-community.org
Who is behind the forum and this monthly digest? This project is led by Loïc Lannelongue at the University of Cambridge and supported by the Wellcome Trust (among others). Anica Araneta is in charge of day-to-day community management. Any questions about that? Just get in touch!