The pandemic showed society more about life outside the workspace and why organizations must continuously assess the environmental footprint of their operations.

Past the point of lip service, companies like Intel are being proactive with sustainability.

“We’ve been invested in lowering our environmental footprint for decades,” said Jen Huffstetler (pictured), chief product sustainability officer, vice president and general manager for future platform strategy and sustainability at Intel. “Without action otherwise, we’ve already lowered our carbon footprint by 75%. So we’re really in that last mile, which is why we recently announced a very ambitious goal of net-zero emissions by 2040.”

Huffstetler spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and John Furrier at HPE Discover, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the movement toward sustainability in enterprise computing. (* Disclosure below.)

A shared responsibility

With the growth of energy consumption by digital infrastructures (7%) outpacing the overall increase in global energy demand (3%), a shift toward sustainability here would make a difference in the overall footprint. Thus, IT leaders must commit to improving their infrastructures to be greener and less wasteful, according to Huffstetler.

The sustainability goals at Intel go beyond the company’s already-established offices, factories and boundaries to accommodate its ongoing and future projects — in addition to its acquisitions.

“When we onboard acquisitions, as any company does, we need to look at the footprint of the acquisition and see what we can do to align it with our overall goals,” Huffstetler added.

Another element in the enterprise sustainability discussion is the efficient tech powering that operational shift. Chief of these is the acceleration of virtual technologies, according to Huffstetler.

“Built-in accelerated compute is green compute. It allows you to maximize the utilization of the transistors that you already have deployed in your data center. This compute is sitting there, and it is ready to be used,” she stated.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Discover event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for HPE Discover. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE