 Welcome to Dell Technologies World. It's the premier technology event of the year. Join John Furrier, Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin as they talk to the trailblazers and trendsetters of future technology. Dell Technologies World 2023 and theCUBE, the leader in live and emerging high tech coverage. Good evening everyone and welcome back to theCUBE after dark. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante covering day one of Dell Technologies World 23. We're live at Mandalay Bay. Dave, we've had some great conversations. Night one, the energy in this room is one of our previous guests called Electric. I agree. Speaking of energy, right? All these GPT models, the foundation models is sucking up a lot of energy. Really are. Right, so that's a big topic of conversation. So listen, it's the future. You can't protect the past from the future, Lisa. So what you have to do, reduce that carbon footprint. That's right. And we're going to have a great conversation about sustainability. There's a big focus at Dell Technologies World on that this year. Welcome our two guests, Dr. Allison Freeman, Dell Sustainability Product Manager, Infrastructure Solutions. And Jennifer Huffstetler is here Intel Chief Product Sustainability Officer. It's great to have you both on the program. Thank you for having us. Allison, start us off. There's a big sustainability journey focus here at Dell Tech World this year. Talk about what that is. What are some of the options that the attendees get to kind of choose their own adventure on with respect to sustainability? Oh, there's so much. First, there's a whole booth area related to sustainability where there's a modular data center, liquid cooling, concept Luna robots are there, which are amazing, all of our sustainable materials, as well as a whole host of sessions and birds of a feather. There's at least two or three every day. Nice. Talk a little bit about, you've got a session driving decarbonization, innovation for a climate resistant future, which is absolutely what we should be talking about. Give us a little sneak peek about maybe the three key takeaways that the audience is going to hear from that session. It's a panel that includes people from corporate sustainability, our CSG side and ISG side. And so you'll be able to hear a little bit about the difference between product carbon footprints and how we're carrying that across all of Dell and some of our latest sustainable innovations. So I remember one time I watched Milton Friedman. It was like video of this great economist. And he had a pencil. And he said, no one person or even company can make this pencil. No one person, you know what I'm saying? Because you said the graphite inside comes from this place, the wood comes from that place, the eraser comes from rubber in South America, the brass around there, et cetera. And it strikes me that, understanding a product's carbon footprint is similar. So how do you do that? What's the anatomy of a product's carbon footprint? Absolutely. So there's four parts to a product carbon footprint, the manufacturing phase, transportation, use phase and then end of life. In the data center side, almost all of the impact is in the use phase. And that's why we talk a lot about energy efficiency. Jennifer, talk a little bit about EPIT, which is electronic product environmental assessment tool. What is that? How do products get designations? Maybe you can both talk on that. Yeah, it's one of the standards regulations and many of our products, both Intel's products and Dell's products, they go through a rigorous assessment so that you can identify the difference between a good enough solution and a great solution. I don't know if you want to add anything, Allison. I think that's exactly right. Some people might be familiar with Energy Star for energy ratings for your refrigerator or dishwasher and we have those on server and storage products and other stuff. So EPIT is another type of label like that, but it goes even further than energy use. It looks at a lot of other sustainability features, like recycled materials use, end of life, transparency. And it's a great third party way to evaluate product sustainability. So you said the use phase is by far the biggest culprit, right? Is that correct? On the data center side. Now, if you're talking about a laptop or a computer, it's actually manufacturing phase. And so you'll see the types of innovations at Dell and Intel that on the laptops and notebooks, you're focusing on how to be more responsibly manufactured and in the data center, we're going to talk about how to make them more efficient and what's beautiful is we have the full spectrum of products and so we can learn from each side and carry those learnings across. Is that because the manufacturing phase, what about the manufacturing phase is it extracting a lithium from the ground, like EVs, right? Well, I can start on the semiconductor side. So obviously we've been at this for many decades and the chemistries haven't changed in that much time. So what Intel's been working on for the last several years is how do you bring renewable electricity to that semiconductor process? So we are now at 93% renewable electricity when making our chips, whether it's a Xeon processor or the core processor going into the client. That is something you want to be looking for to lower your scope three upstream emissions. So it helps our customers lower their carbon footprint and then furthermore, you know, we're working on industry initiatives so that you can then find green chemistries in partnership with academia and beyond. So we're able to achieve a near net zero by 2040. By 2040, okay. So Alison, talk a little bit about, from a customer's perspective, we're hearing very high percentages of RFPs from customers are coming in to companies like Dell and probably Intel saying they need to work with companies that have the ESG program sustainability but to help them, to your point, Jennifer, reduce their carbon footprint, help them be more sustainable and achieving their objectives. Talk about that from the customer's perspective and how does that influence Dell's sustainability strategy? We've seen a lot of customers asking about that. Originally it was because of their own internal goals and us helping them meet them or sometimes it's about regulation and they want to know how we can help them meet the regulation needs that they'll have. And what's special about this is we have to work with them because every data center, the products in it have a different configuration. It's not, you can't just offer one size fits all solution. So it's something that we really have to partner with our customers on to help them reach their goals. So when you think of something like, we hear a lot about PowerEdge servers, you get Intel processors in there and other components. So they're much more powerful so they're going to use more energy but my understanding is you can do the work of multiple. So is that where we get the energy savings and the goal, everybody's goal is get the PUE of one. It's like never get there but the holy grail. Can you add some color to that and explain where we get the benefit as the industry progresses? Yeah, I can start and you can continue. I mean, data center energy efficiency is something we've been working on for decades, right? In the last 15 years alone, by continuing to deliver a cagger of 15% performance per watt improvements, we've saved 1,000 terawatt hours of energy consumption for the planet. When you do that, we're innovating inside the processor as well so not only are you getting more performance at lower power with Moore's Law and other transistor innovations, we're also having product innovations inside to accelerate the workload for common and growing workloads like AI and we're able to achieve up to 14x performance per watt improvement just over the last generation of processor and there's more on the platform side as well. Yes, as the Intel processors can do more and more compute power, a lot of the carbon impact and your energy cost has to do with cooling the processors and so as we innovate in our cooling technology, we can help compensate for the amount of extra power needed for the compute that the world needs. So, liquid cooling obviously has come back in a big way and I presume that generative AI is going to necessitate even more liquid. Is it, what's the state of liquid cooling today? Is it, does it have to evolve? I mean, is it, are we, we need to be? Yeah, it's going to be a journey. Today, there's certainly many deployments in a lot of different sectors. I would say some folks are just starting their POCs and getting ready to get used to it. Other customers are looking to build the greatest anti-sitters on the planet that are immersion only and from our standpoint, what we're trying to partner with the ecosystem to do is ensure that there's materials compatibility specs at the open compute project, right? So how can the industry align on what good looks like for a liquid and then also, of course, seeking to advocate for liquids that don't have greenhouse warming gases. And today some of them do and we really need to encourage the whole industry to innovate and come up with new thermal liquids. Yeah, great. Anything, Ted? Allison, can you comment a little bit on the part, the long-time partnership that Dell has had with Intel and how that delivers Dell's competitive advantage to your customers? I think that our close relationships helps us understand where the roadmap is headed so that we can plan around that. And Dell and Intel share a lot of the same sustainability goals and values, so it makes a lot of sense. Well, so when I think about this topic, I remember it ebbs and flows, right? It used to be, I remember before the economy turned down in 2007, 2008, 2009, people were all excited about green IT. And then when the economy started booming again, they said, forget about it, you know, and they just, amnesia. It feels like that's not going to happen this time because we're at a really tipping point. If the industry doesn't deal with this problem, then there is no industry. And I was struck, when I got this laptop, I was amazed that, first I saw the packaging, I'm like, wow, looks kind of not that attractive. Then I felt it, I was like, wow, that's got to be recycled material, sustainable material. I opened it up. The power cords were from recycled, you could just feel it, right? So I don't know, then I saw the little internal, whatever, sticker, 90 some odd percent. So it seems like the industry understands the nature of this problem. It's going to force people to absorb, without even thinking about it. Is that a fair characterization? And what other things is the industry doing that we haven't talked about? So green IT, you're absolutely right. It's not going anywhere. And I think that there's also IT for green, which is using technology to solve the world's climate problem. So it kind of goes both ways. I love that you mentioned our sustainable packaging. We have a goal of 100% recycled packaging by 2030. And one of our other goals is our take back for every product we sell, we want to take back one. And so that's about end of life. And what happens to all this e-waste when we're done with it? And this is something Dell has been doing well for a long time, for 25 years, taking back recycled products, reusing them in whole, reusing them in part or recycling them, and that will have a huge impact. I got to talk to you afterwards because I actually found the other day, like three laptops that I had, they're all Dell laptops. And it was before there was this take back concept. I just forgot about them. And I put them there because I didn't want, I was like, someday I'm going to drill a hole in the hard drive, back then that's what you used to do. So that's a huge... Did you know you can take them to any good will and Dell is the ones that recycle it. And one of our important parts of take back is taking security very seriously and wiping equipment through our tech refresh programs and certifying that it's wiped before reusing them. I didn't know that. I didn't know that either. David Butler said, he just told me the other day that there's a place you can take them. I didn't know you were behind it, so. It's in partnership with Goodwill. That's all across the US. But a lot of that really relies on the end user, right? To have the behavior, to be responsible. Talk a little bit about how does Dell and maybe Intel as well, how do you help people become more responsible? Where sustainability is concerned if we're talking about old laptops and things? Oh, well we have programs like Tech Refresh for our storage where we'll take all your old equipment back, Dell or other competitors and take it off of your hands and then you get a credit for your future Dell purchase. There's other return streams like asset recovery services where they provide cash back instead. There's kind of different ways that it works. We're working on consolidating those. But there's incentives, I think. Yeah, strong incentive programs. On the consumer side, I think on the enterprise side and in the data centers, they're already motivated, right? They're trying to figure out, how do we get more compute in our existing shell? How can we lower our energy costs? And I think that's something we didn't talk about is some of the partnership that Intel and Dell have on integrating our technologies together. So platform telemetry with your open-managed software. It's really that tight partnership that we have that helps to the enterprise operator, the IT operator, better manage their energy consumption. I think some of the incentives to change the behavior are going to come out through these regulations, through the EU. I was really excited to see some of the things that I've been passionate about and talking about for the last year and a half around server utilization being pretty low, around the software inefficiencies that happen already. The EU is going to now require some reporting around server utilization, and that's once you start measuring something, you're going to drive change. What's the key metric, Jennifer? Because you're probably not going to lower your power bill, but when you divide by some metric, you're going to be able to just keep getting better and better, right? What is the key metric? I think the key metrics has to have something to do with the amount of work that you're getting done within the rack space and for the power. So it's like a multi-layered metric that doesn't quite exist yet. It's like an intensity metric that most folks aren't thinking about. But when we are able to achieve server consolidation, which every generation, you're able to get more and more work done, more virtual machines, more containers on a system, that could be a data center and all of that concrete that you're not pouring. And so I think at the end of the day, that's really what we're driving towards is higher utilizations, you know, fully utilizing what I call no transistor left behind. Like every... I love that. Isn't that great? And another one we have is no watt left behind. So don't waste a single watt of energy that you're putting in there. So if you're just idling a server, you're kind of wasting the energy. Instead of, you know, accepting the behavioral changes for your service, can it, can my SLA be a little bit longer than it is to wake up the server? Work per energy consumed, and then even data center avoidance. This is enormous. Well, then the operators are motivated, right? They should be. It's cat-backs, avoidance, but it's also, there's a lot of carbon footprint when that, you know, each new shell that gets spelt out, right? That's bottom line impact. I mean, that goes right to the P&L. Absolutely. Last question. Where can folks go on both sides to learn more about how Dell and Intel can help them dial down that carbon footprint? Any website or anything that you want to send the audience to? I think we have dell.com slash sustainability. I think a lot of, same with Intel. It's intel.com sustainability and some of our joint projects are there and publications. Yep, awesome. Oh my gosh, we didn't even talk about concept Luna. They have to go, there's so many great partnerships. We did not. What's about that? So, sorry. And it's another great partnership. Yes, one of my favorite projects. It's a sustainable laptop that, I mean, do you want to add? Please. Okay. They look at reusing parts so that if your screen breaks, your processor breaks, then you don't need to throw out the speakers and the keyboard. You can, it's just rethinking laptop design and we have a lot of them on display here in the Expo Center and Intel was a huge part of that project. Okay, so like, for instance, if I damage my screen or something, can you just replace a portion of it, you're saying to keep everything else? Yeah, and robots do it. And there's QR codes on everything to understand the, how long things, I mean, it's a concept laptop. This isn't, this is like a concept. Are those battery powered robots? No. Project Luna, actually. I just, the pencil, it's very complicated, you know, value chain. It is. And if you can architect it and design it for sustainability in that sense, a circular economy from the beginning, the way that it's, even their second gen now has these keystones, you're just, your mind is blown when you see somebody take it apart. This is the future of every electronics device. Very cool. And work, we're going to learn more about Project Luna, here at the show floor, you said? Yes, in the sustainability booth area. It's in between future of work and the ISG booths. Exciting. Ladies, thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program, talking about what Intel and Dell are doing together to really deliver sustainable solutions to your customers, help them meet their goals too. We really appreciate your insights. Yeah. Thank you so much. Appreciate the conversation. Yes, and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, coming to you live from the show floor of Dell Technologies World 23 from Vegas. Stick around, Dave and I have one more guest tonight. We'll see you soon.