As society’s interest in generative AI models and their capabilities continues to soar, we are witnessing an unprecedented surge in compute demand. This surge is stressing every aspect of the cloud ecosystem at a time when hyperscale providers are striving to become carbon-neutral. In this talk, I will address the challenges in managing the power, energy, and sustainability of this expanding AI infrastructure. I will also quickly overview some of my team’s efforts to tackle these challenges and explore potential research avenues going forward. Ultimately, we will need a large research and development effort to create a more sustainable and efficient future for AI.

Dr. Ricardo Bianchini is a Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President at Microsoft Azure, where he leads the team responsible for managing Azure’s Compute workload, server capacity and design, and datacenter infrastructure with a strong focus on efficiency and sustainability. Before joining Azure in 2022, he conducted research in datacenter power and energy management, among other cloud-related topics, for many years. Ricardo is a Fellow of both the ACM and IEEE.