January 30th, 2025

3 min read

Data centers have traditionally had a negative impact on the environment due to their heavy consumption of water and electricity. And this consumption is expected to grow, due to the rapidly increasing demand for generative AI applications and the related expansion of data centers. To ensure a sustainable future, it is essential to find ways to improve energy efficiency and reduce power use while meeting growing data needs.

NTT, one of the world’s biggest data center operators, is addressing these environmental concerns by focusing on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and taking steps that include using renewable energy, improving its cooling systems, sharing excess heat with others, and exploring renewable fuel options. NTT is also focused on monitoring and tracking of emissions, most of which come from electricity used for cooling, along with potential refrigerant leaks and fuel for backup power systems. To support this work, NTT has introduced the Smart World Platform, a new pilot program designed to shift from manual emission tracking to a more automated and efficient reporting system.

How Smart World delivers valuable business insights

The Smart World Platform is a transition from manual spreadsheets to a streamlined, automated data-driven approach. By centralizing the collection of carbon emissions and water usage data, the platform creates a comprehensive sustainability metrics repository. This repository allows for advanced data analytics, revealing valuable – and previously hidden – business insights that support improved sustainability modeling, forecasting and decision-making.

Designed to enhance data accuracy, the Smart World Platform consolidates data collection and aggregation into a single tool, ensuring consistency. It continuously gathers data from various sources, rather than on a monthly or quarterly basis, creating a vast data lake of sustainability-related information. Data analytic tools operating on this data lake provide crucial business intelligence, comparing the performance of specific pieces of equipment to identify outliers and abnormal performance which can then help drive improvements.

Benefits of an automated approach to tracking emissions

The platform allows NTT to set upper and lower control limits for data sets, triggering alerts when performance deviates from established thresholds. This real-time monitoring means that potential violations of forecasted carbon emissions can be addressed immediately, rather than waiting for reviews a month later. As additional sites are integrated into the system, the resulting larger datasets will offer even greater insights.

The Smart World Platform enables NTT to quickly set a baseline for its carbon footprint, visualize data through accurate, live dashboards, and track key performance indicators (KPIs). Decision-makers can access precise, fact-based data on various sustainability improvements, such as using hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) instead of fossil diesel in generators. HVO is derived from waste vegetable oil, offering a lifespan of 10 years with minimal contamination. This choice aligns with NTT’s commitment to sustainability and provides a safe, reliable solution for customers.

NTT’s global data center decarbonization best practices

The Smart World Platform is currently being implemented as a pilot in NTT data centers in the U.S., where it is enhancing accuracy and efficiency in monitoring carbon emissions, waste, and water usage, and providing better sustainability insights. But that is not the company’s only move toward reducing emissions and improving energy efficiency. Around the world, there are numerous other examples, including:

  • Austria: NTT is implementing HVO100, a renewable fuel made from waste vegetables, oils, fats, and minerals, to power its backup systems. This innovative solution reduces CO2 emissions by up to 90 percent, offering a more sustainable and reliable energy source.
  • India: In response to high-density client requirements, NTT is optimizing energy efficiency, ensuring that its data centers operate sustainably while meeting the growing demand for data services. This balance between energy use and environmental responsibility is critical in a region with rising data needs.
  • Germany: NTT has partnered with a distributed network provider to repurpose excess heat from its data centers, providing carbon-free heating and warm water to local communities.

Data centers of the future

Looking ahead, NTT plans to extend Smart World services to clients, enabling them to track their own sustainability efforts within NTT facilities. The platform was recently named one of three MVP Award winners at the 2024 NTT Group Sustainability Conference Awards, and NTT is reviewing how it can be used to gain further insights into its own energy usage, including seasonal trends.

This pilot initiative will serve as a model for scaling across all NTT data center sites. By leveraging the Smart World Platform’s predictive intelligence, NTT gains transparency in its operations, as well as being better positioned to optimize energy usage, adopt innovative cooling technologies, and form strategic partnerships, putting it on track to achieve its goal of zero emissions by 2030. This is not only good for business, setting a standard for sustainability in the technology industry, but also benefits the community, society, and the planet as a whole.