Harnessing AI for Climate Change Mitigation and Resilience

The Information and Communications Technology industry’s estimated consumption of worldwide electricity stands at 2-3%, and it is predicted to increase to between 8-21% by 2030.  Network devices are particularly energy inefficient, consuming significant power even when they are idle and there is no data to communicate. This means that the power consumption of the network infrastructure cannot currently adapt to usage. As a result, policies that incentivize more efficient energy usage are ineffective. This project aims to address this problem via the development of network devices with novel circuit designs that use energy in proportion to the amount of network traffic they are servicing. Success will be quantified by measuring the power consumption of the new circuit design and comparing it to the power consumption of existing devices.