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Jennifer L. Schenker
Innovator Founder and Editor-in-Chief |
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Three promising medical breakthroughs were in the news this week: Reseachers announced that small membrane bubbles that serve as the body’s “message in a bottle” can be loaded with medicines and targeted to specific tissues, potentially transforming treatment for cancer and other diseases; molecular markers have been identified that allow Alzheimer’s disease to be detected as much as 20 years before the onset; and a bio-inspired haptic technology developed in the UK could help patients who have lost sensitivity in their hands and fingers and give a sense of feeling to robotics for medical surgery and nuclear decommissioning.
Read on to learn more about this story and this week's other important technology news impacting business.
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AI can help tackle the climate crisis but unless measures are put in place AI's environmental footprint risks to become a part of the climate problem.
Hyperscalers, which include Google, Microsoft and Amazon, are driving the swift proliferation of electricity-guzzling data centers to expand their artificial intelligence and cloud computing technologies. As a result, the International Energy Agency, says that by 2026 data centers could use twice as much energy as two years ago—an amount roughly equivalent to adding “at least one Sweden or at most one Germany.”
The increasing demand is not just putting a strain on the grid. The boom in data centers is expected to produce about 2.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions globally through the end of the decade, according to Morgan Stanley research published in early September.
In addition, as data centers expand to support larger and more complex AI models, their power consumption and subsequent cooling requirements are expected to increase proportionally, further straining water resources.
But there is another side to the story. The energy grids of the future will require more powerful analytical tools and AI has a critical role to play. Young companies like BrainBox AI, iGenius and Crusoe are using AI to help companies become more sustainable and others are using the technology to help protect the environment by doing everything from helping predict forest fires to preventing illegal over fishing.
This raises thorny questions, says an article published on the World Economic Forum's website. “Do the economic and societal benefits of AI outweigh the environmental cost of using it? And more specifically, do the benefits of AI for the energy transition outweigh its increased energy consumption?”
The Forum is one of a number of players tackling AI climate issues. France’s GenAI Impact is creating tools to measure and reduce the environmental impacts of using and deploying AI, Cloud providers such as Scaleway and evroc are using new approaches to significantly lower the footprint of data centers and consultants like Germany’s bluegain are advising companies on specific ways to reduce AI-related water consumption.
The topic will also be front and center at the XYZ Generative AI for business conference in Paris September 27. “Assessing The Environmental Impact Of Generative AI: The Challenges & Opportunities” is the title of a panel which will be moderated by The Innovator’s Editor-in-Chief. Interviews with the panelists and with the Forum shed light on AI’s climate conundrum and what companies can do now to lower AI’s environmental impact.
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Who: Frédéric Vacher is Head of Innovation, Dassault Systèmes and founder of the company’s 3DEXPERIENCE Lab, an open innovation lab with a strong network of incubator partners and five main hubs in Paris, Boston, Pune, Munich and Shanghai. Innovations that have emerged from the lab include 3D printing of organs, autonomous solar drones and stent implant simulation. Vacher is scheduled to speak at the XYZ Generative AI conference at Station F in Paris on September 27 in a fireside chat about innovation and AI with The Innovator’s Editor-in-Chief.
Topic: AI and Innovation
Quote: "Despite the risks, I'm a great believer in GenAI and the opportunities it offers. We've all been producing data for 20 years over the Internet, on databases, servers and the Cloud. Thanks to GenAI, we're finally going to be able to make the most of it and not just gain in productivity but also ramp up innovation."
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| Cubbit, an Italian scale-up that bills itself as the world’s first geo-distributed Cloud storage enabler, says it can offer companies full control of their data and ransomware protection while reducing costs and cutting emissions. It has 350+ European companies and partners, including Leonardo, a global defense and cybersecurity company.
More than 180 billion terabytes of data will be produced in 2025 and 75% of this will be created and processed at the edge. This explosive growth raises data orchestration complexity, cyber-attacks, sovereignty risks, and costs, says the company.
Cubbit says it overcomes these challenges by enabling organizations to create, in just minutes, their own geo-distributed storage-as-a-service that can slot into any infrastructure and policy framework - from hybrid cloud to the edge. It does this by encrypting data, splitting it into redundant chunks and distributing it across multiple locations or a specific geographical perimeter that customers choose. The result is a resilient, flexible, cost-efficient and greener Cloud storage service that protects European data, says Stefano Onofri, the company’s co-founder and Co-CEO.
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Percentage Increase in cyberattacks again U.S. utilities this year over the same period in 2023, according to data from Check Point Research, underlining the escalating threat to a critical infrastructure. The utilities and power infrastructure across the U.S. are becoming increasingly vulnerable as the grid expands rapidly to meet surging demand for power and assets are digitalized. The expansion of the grid, including incremental interconnections to new customers like GenAI data centers, is creating more potential points of attack.
Meanwhile, Britain's data centers will be classified "as critical national infrastructure", the government said on September 12, giving the servers and IT systems that underpin the country's communications extra protection from cyberattacks. UK Science and technology secretary Peter Kyle announced that sites storing National Health Service, financial and personal smartphone data will be given this new designation.
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XYZ, Paris, France, Sept. 27
Cybertech Europe 2024, Rome, Italy, October 8-9
GESDA, Geneva, Switzerland, October 9-11
XPanse 2024, Abu Dhabi, November 20-22
TiE Global, Bangalore, India, Dec. 9-12
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