 TheCube presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCube's continuous coverage, HPE Discover 2022 and from Las Vegas, the formerly Sands Convention Center, now Venetian, John Furrier and Dave Vellante here. We're excited to welcome in Jen Huffstetler, who's the Chief Product Sustainability Officer at Intel, Jen. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. Thank you very much for having me. You're really welcome. You dial back, I don't know, the last decade and nobody really cared about it. Some people gave it lip service, but corporations generally weren't as in tune. What's changed? Why has it become so top of mind? I think in the last year, we've noticed as we all were working from home that we had a greater appreciation for the balance in our lives and the impact that climate change was having on the world. So I think across the globe, there's regulations, industry and even personally, everyone is really starting to think about this a little more and corporations specifically are trying to figure out how are they going to continue to do business in these new regulated environments? And IT leaders generally weren't in tune because they weren't paying the power bill for years, it was the facilities people, but then they started to come together. How should leaders in technology, business tech leaders, IT leaders, CIOs, how should they be thinking about their sustainability goals? Yeah, I think for IT leaders specifically, they really want to be looking at the footprint of their overall infrastructure. So whether that is their on-prem data center, their cloud instances, what can they do to maximize the resources and lower the footprint that they contribute to their company's overall footprint? So IT really has a critical role to play, I think, because as you'll find in IT, the carbon footprint of the data center, of those products in use is actually, it's fairly significant. So having a focus there will be key. You know, compute's always been one of those things where, you know, Intel's been makes chips, so you know, heat is important in compute. What is Intel's current goals? Give us an update on where you guys are at. What's your ideal goal in the long term? Where are you now? You guys always had a focus on this for a long, long time. Where are we now? Because I won't say the goalposts have changed. They're changing the definitions of what this means. What's the current state of Intel's carbon footprint and overall goals? Yeah, thanks for asking. As you mentioned, we've been invested in lowering our environmental footprint for decades. In fact, without action otherwise, you know, we've already lowered our carbon footprint by 75%. So we're really in that last mile. And that is why, when we recently announced a very ambitious goal, Net Zero 2040 for our scope one and two, for manufacturing operations, this is really an industry-leading goal and partly because the technology doesn't even exist, right? For the chemistries and for making the silicon into the sand into, you know, computer chips yet. And so by taking this bold goal, we're going to be able to lead the industry to partner with academia, partner with consortia. And that drive is going to have ripple effects across the industry and all of the components in semiconductors. Is there a changing definition of Net Zero? What that means? Because some people say they're Net Zero and maybe in one area they might be, but maybe holistically across the company as it becomes more of a broader mandate. Society, employees, partners, Wall Street are all putting pressure on companies. Is the Net Zero conversation changed a little bit or what's your view on that? I think we definitely at least see it changing and with changing regulations like those coming forth from the SEC here in the US and in Europe. Net Zero can't just be lip service anymore, right? It really has to be real reductions on your footprint. And we say it then otherwise and even including in our supply chain goals what we've taken new goals to reduce but our operations are growing. So I think everybody is going through this realization that with the growth, how do we keep it lower than it would have been otherwise? Keep focusing on those reductions and have not just renewable credits that could have been bought in one location and applied to a different geographical location but real credible offsets for where the product's manufactured or the compute's deployed. Jen, when you talk about you've reduced already by 75% you're on that last mile. We listened to Pat Gelsinger very closely up until recently he was the number one most frequently had on the Cube guest. He's been busy I guess. But as you apply that discipline to where you've been, your existing business and now Pat's laid out this plan to increase the foundry business. How does that affect your, are you able to carry through that reduction to the new foundries? Do you have to rethink that? How does that play in? Certainly, well the foundry expansion of our business with IDM 2.0 is going to include the existing factories that already have the benefit of those decades of investment and focus. And then we have clear goals for our new factories in Ohio and Europe to achieve goals as well. That's part of the overall plan for NetZero 2040. It's inclusive of our expansion into foundry which means that many, many, many more customers are going to be able to benefit from the leadership that Intel has here. And then as 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. Yeah, so sustainable IT was I don't know for some reason was always an area of interest to me. And when we first started even before I met you John we worked with PG&E to help companies get rebates for installing technologies that would reduce their carbon footprint. Very forward thinking. And it was a hard thing to get you know but compute was the big deal. And there were technologies, I remember virtualization at the time was one where and we would go in and explain to the PG&E engineers how that all worked and of course there they had metrics and that they wanted to see. But anyway, so virtualization was clearly one factor. What are the technologies today that people should be paying at that flash storage was another one reduce the spinning disk but what are the ones today that are going to have an impact? Yeah, that's a great question. We like to think of the built-in acceleration that we have including some of the early acceleration or for virtualization technologies as foundational. So built-in accelerated compute is green compute and it allows you to maximize the utilization of the transistors that you already have deployed in your data center. This computer is sitting there and it is ready to be used. What matters most is what you were talking about John that real world workload performance and it's not just you know, a lot of specsmanship around synthetic benchmarks but AI performance with the built-in acceleration that we have in Xeon processors with the Intel DL boost we're able to achieve 4x the AI performance per watt without you know doing that otherwise. You think about the consolidation you were talking about that happened with virtualization. You're basically effectively doing the same thing with these built-in accelerators that we have continued to add over time and have even more coming in our sapphire generation. And you call that green compute? Or is it, what does that mean, green compute? Well you are greening your compute by increasing the utilization of your resources. If you're able to deploy AI, utilize the telemetry within the CPU that already exists. We have customers, KDDI in Japan has a great proof point that they already announced on their 5G data center. Lower their data center power by 20%. That is real bottom line impact as well as carbon footprint impact by utilizing all of those built-in capabilities. So yeah. We heard some stories earlier in the event here at Discover where there was some cooling innovations that was powering moving the heat to power pounds in cities. So you start to see, and you guys have been following this data center and been part of the whole, okay, in hot climates, you know, cold climates, but there's new ways to recycle energy. Where is that? Because that sounds very sci-fi to me that, oh yeah, the whole town runs on the data center exhaust. So there's now systems thinking around compute. What's your reaction to that? What's the current view on re-engineering a system to take advantage of that energy or recycling? I think when we look at our vision of sustainable compute over this horizon, it's going to be required, right? We know that compute helps to solve society's challenges and the demand for it's not going away. So how do we take new innovations, looking at a systems level as compute gets further deployed at the edge? How do we make it efficient? How do we ensure that that compute can be deployed where there is air pollution, right? So some of these technologies that you have, they not only enable reuse, but they also enable some closing in of the solution to make it more robust for edge deployments. It'll allow you to place your data center wherever you need it. It no longer needs to reside in one place and then that's going to allow you to have those energy reuse benefits either into district heating, if you're in Northern Europe or there's examples with folks putting greenhouses right next to a data center to start growing food in what were previously food deserts. So I don't think it's science fiction. It is how we need to rethink as a society to utilize everything we have at the tools at our hand. There's some, there's a commercial on the radio on the East Coast anyway. I'm with you guys here. It's like, what's your one thing? And the gentleman comes on, he talks about things that you can do to help the environment. And he says, what's your one thing? So what's the one thing? Or maybe it's not just one that IT managers should be doing to affect carbon footprint. The one thing to affect their carbon footprint, there are so many things. Hey, we're two, three, you tell me. If I was going to pick the one most impactful thing that they could do in their infrastructure is it's back to John's comment. It's imagine if the world deployed AI, all the benefits not only in business outcomes, the revenue, lowering the TCO, but also lowering the footprint. So I think that's the one thing they could do if I could throw in a baby second. It would be really consider how you get renewable energy into your computing ecosystem. And at Intel, when we're 80% renewable power, our processors are inherently low carbon because of all the work that we've done. Others have less than 10% renewable energy. So you want to look for products that have low carbon by design, any Intel based system and where you can get renewables from your grid to ask for it, run your workload there. And even the next step to get to sustainable computing, it's going to take everyone, including every enterprise to think differently and really, you know, consider what would it look like to bring renewables onto my site if I don't have access through my local utility. And many customers are really starting to evaluate that. Jen, it's great to have you on the queue. Great insight into the current state of the art of sustainability and carbon footprint. My final question for you is more about the talent out there, the younger generation coming in, I'll say the pressure. People want to work for a company that's mission driven. We know that the Wall Street impact is going to be financial business model and then save the planet kind of pressure. So there's a lot of talent coming in. Is there awareness at the university level? Is there a course where you can, do people get degrees in sustainability? There's a lot of people who want to come into this field. What are some of the talent backgrounds of people learning or who might want to be in this field? What would you recommend? How would you describe how to onboard into the career if they want to contribute? What are some of those factors? Because it's not new, new, but it's going to be globally aware. Yeah, well, there certainly are degrees with focuses on sustainability, maybe to look at holistically at the enterprise, but where I think the globe is really going to benefit. We didn't really talk about the software inefficiency and as we delivered more and more computer over the last few decades, the programming languages got more inefficient. So there's at least 35% inefficiency in the software. So being a software engineer, even if you're not an AI engineer, so AI would probably be the highest impact being a software engineer to focus on building new applications that are going to be efficient applications, that they're well utilizing the transistor, that they're not leaving zombie services running, that aren't being utilized. I actually think. So we got a program in assembly? Ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha. Oh, hey, storehouse. Go get really efficient. Get machine language. I have to throw that in this heart. They did not bag that part. Ha ha ha ha. That's a processor joke. But the question is, what's my career path? What's a hot career in this area? Sustainability, AI? Totally see that. Anything else in the other career opportunities? Do you see your hot jobs or hot areas to work on? Yeah, I mean, just really, I think it takes every architect, every engineer, to think differently about their design, whether it's the design of a building, or the design of a processor, or a motherboard. We have a whole low carbon architecture set of actions that we're underway that will take to the ecosystem. So it could really span from any engineering discipline, I think, but it's a mindset with which you approach that customer problem. That's just I'm thinking, yeah. Yeah, sustainability designed in. Jen, thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE. We're coming on theCUBE. It's great to have you. Thank you. All right. Dave Vellante for John Furrier. We're sustaining theCUBE. We're winding down day three. HPE Discover 2022, we'll be right back.