Uniting to Create a Future of Sustainable Computing
Intel helps bring together ecosystems that combine unique skills to drive innovation, reduce carbon emissions, and help everyone achieve our collective sustainability goals. Together, we’re accelerating the era of sustainable computing.
Making a Difference Together
Climate change poses a challenge that cannot be solved by one company, one industry, or even one country. Real impact demands strategic collaboration, diverse perspectives, and shared innovation. That’s why we’re uniting ecosystems to drive our entire value chain toward a more sustainable future. With everyone working together—customers, investors, competitors, industry, governments, and NGO peers—we can achieve the speed and scale required to combat climate change.
Collaborating for Speed and Scale
At Intel, we’re not just raising the bar for our operations and products—we’re pursuing high-impact collaborations with customers and peers across industries to define the future of sustainable computing, accelerate sustainable practices, and share results.
Learn more about areas where we’re focusing our collaborative efforts, initiatives, and investments.
Uniting Voices to Positively Influence Public Policy
We believe we achieve better outcomes when we speak with one voice. We have a dedicated team of experts that work to address the most pressing sustainability policy and regulatory challenges facing our industry. We work with industry, governments, international organizations, civil society, and other stakeholders around the world, uniting voices to advance policies, regulations, and standards across environmental and chemical regulation, product energy efficiency, and responsible business conduct, including supply chain sustainability and human rights. Read Intel perspectives related to environment and energy policy
Government Agencies
We collaborate with government agencies such as the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the European Commission. We strive to help develop better energy-efficiency regulations and promote sustainable computing. We also support policies that recognize and enable technology’s growing role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, such as applying information and communications technology (ICT) devices that drive end-use energy efficiency gains.
Trade Associations and Collaborative Think Tank Partnerships
We engage with trade associations and think tanks to combine efforts with other companies and groups to address key policy issues and educate policymakers about the benefits of sustainable computing. For instance, we collaborate with the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES) to encourage climate action. As a member of the Responsible Business Alliance (RBA) Chemical Management Work Group and the Responsible Minerals Initiative (RMI), we educate policymakers on the benefits of collective action on responsible global supply chain practices. Intel is an active participant in the RBA Chemical Management Work Group, which works to increase awareness of safe chemical use and disposal through policies, risk assessments, and training.
Standards Bodies
We work closely with hundreds of standards bodies worldwide, such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), and CEN-CENELEC, to develop more-comprehensive standards that encourage innovation, maximize sustainability outcomes, and enable the international ecosystem to thrive.
Advancing Industry Standards
We actively engage in a variety of alliances to advance industry standards and methodologies, with a focus on lowering emissions across the semiconductor and ICT industries.
Lowering Emissions across the Supply Chain
As a founding member of SEMI’s Semiconductor Climate Consortium, we help unite the industry and streamline efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We also collaborate extensively with suppliers and customers to help set electronics industry standards, develop audit practices, increase supplier focus on energy conservation and renewable energy sourcing, and drive chemical and resource efficiencies.
Harmonizing Product Carbon Footprint Methods
In collaboration with consortia such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Product Attribute to Impact Algorithm (PAIA) Consortium, we are helping to develop a common approach for product carbon footprint (PCF) and life-cycle assessment (LCA) reporting across the ICT industry. A common approach ensures product carbon measurements are accurate, accepted by the industry, reproducible, and easy to calculate, report, and share with end users, empowering everyone to make better decisions.
Aligning the Wider Ecosystem
We work with groups across the wider ecosystem—including The Open Compute Project, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, NGMN, Green Future Network, Green Software Foundation and industry-led European Union Carbon Neutral Data Centre Pact (CNDCP)—to build an ecosystem of standards and best practices that help lower the ecosystem’s carbon footprint. This includes standards that help scale data center liquid-cooling technology, reduce the carbon emissions of software, and reduce e-waste by advancing modular designs to increase the reuse of server elements generation over generation. We’re also collaborating with The Green Grid to help improve efficiency across the data center ecosystem, including developing new server benchmark tools that more effectively measure the compute energy efficiency of today’s cloud workloads.
Supporting Government Eco-Labels
We support eco-design standards, directives, and tools designed to help purchasers in the public and private sectors evaluate, compare, and select electronic products based on environmental leadership and corporate social responsibility attributes. In 2022, to reduce the carbon footprint of our PC reference designs and end user platforms, we collaborated with OEMs to create three advanced enabling platforms (AEPs) that are Electronic Product Environment Assessment Tool (EPEAT) Gold-Ready.1 Additionally, beginning with 12th Generation platforms, Intel® Evo™ systems receive sustainable innovation points for meeting sustainability and social responsibility standards across the PC life cycle as defined in the global ecolabels EPEAT and TCO. By requiring modern standby and the single rail PSU, it ensures smaller, more efficient form factors designed to help OEMs meet Energy Star and EPEAT environmental and social responsibility standards. As part of our work with the European Commission and other stakeholders on the upcoming EU Lot 3 Computers regulation revision, we continue to make progress with DIGITALEUROPE on finalizing the new benchmark tool for a PC energy-efficiency metric for A-G labeling recommendations.
Innovation Partnerships
We’re partnering with science and technology leaders to drive innovation across all aspects of computing, including piloting unique solutions to climate action and investing in fundamentally new and disruptive research in sustainable manufacturing.
Supporting Breakthrough Research
Intel and Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, are funding a collaborative research program to harness and augment state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) for breakthroughs in more-sustainable semiconductor processes and manufacturing technologies. We’re also working with SVG Ventures|THRIVE and Texas A&M AgriLife, uniting our ecosystems to advance innovation in controlled environment agriculture (CEA) to address food and nutrition security.
Mentoring and Funding Innovative Startups
SEMI’s Startups for Sustainable Semiconductor Initiative is a mentorship program and pitch event for the world’s top startups that can drive sustainability impact in the semiconductor industry. As a supporting member, Intel Capital, helps seek out and partner with leading innovators to develop new sustainability technologies in the areas of emissions, energy efficiency, and circularity practices in water and waste.
Intel RISE Technology Initiative (IRTI)
Through IRTI, we actively work with partners to identify issues and provide unique technology solutions to some of the world’s most complex challenges, such as climate action. To address environmental and educational needs of the Boa Esperança community in Brazil, we partnered with Dell and the Sustainable Amazon Foundation to establish a solar community hub, using solar power to provide internet access, technology, and services, including access to digital literacy skills and business management training. We also collaborated with Axians to create GreenEdge, a real-time automated environmental footprint reporting system focused on energy and water consumption, waste management, and project forecasting. By automating the collection of emission data, GreenEdge supports legislative efforts to reduce climate impacts and helps organizations achieve their environmental targets.
Advancing Sustainable Engineering through Intel Sustainability Lab
Our hub for sustainable engineering, Intel India’s sustainability lab brings together leaders to solve complex sustainability problems. With the goal of helping to reduce the carbon footprint across the PC life cycle, the lab is exploring innovations such as creating reference designs that reduce the motherboard footprint, sourcing and testing conflict-free minerals, advancing thermal and chassis technologies, and improving an end product’s recyclability.
Investing to Accelerate Sustainable Computing
Intel Capital, our global investment organization, strategically invests to drive innovation in areas that will have the greatest impact on sustainability efforts across our business. We fund forward-thinking companies and initiatives that help accelerate sustainable computing by reimagining the way we design, source, make, and deliver our products and services.
Conserving Water through Technology Advancement
We invest in creating technology solutions that make it easier for Intel and other companies to conserve water. This includes advancing technologies for wastewater collection, treatment, and reuse; new filtration processes such as membrane and electrochemical; and PFAS removal. Innovations in Intel’s onsite reclamation facilities, such as cooling towers and scrubbers, allow us to treat and reuse water within our plants, reducing the use of freshwater sources.
Investing in the Future of Materials
Intel Capital invests in breakthrough material science to achieve more-sustainable manufacturing, including precursor development, green bulk materials, and abatement and recycling. For example, Intel Capital‒funded Impact Nano is enabling safer manufacturing of difficult-to-manage materials, as well as employing green chemistry and circular manufacturing approaches to help customers meet sustainability goals. In the additive manufacturing (AM) space, Intel Capital recently invested in Fabric8Labs, the creator of a novel technology called Electrochemical Additive Manufacturing (ECAM) that harnesses the principles of electrochemistry to produce high-quality metal parts from water-based feedstock containing widely available metal salts. Operating at room temperature with a 100 percent recyclable feedstock, the ECAM process enables drastic reductions in both unit cost and greenhouse gas emissions.
Monitoring the Future of Sustainable Computing
We actively monitor new startups and initiatives to discover new ways to accelerate sustainable computing. We’re exploring applications of software tools that can reduce carbon emissions through more-comprehensive carbon measurement and trading, using data and applied AI for predictive modeling and climate risk forecasting, and reducing resources and improving energy optimization, such as the work The Green Software Initiative is leading. We’re also monitoring new technology investments in data center cooling, carbon capture and storage, energy storage and generation, and grid management solutions.
Green Bond Offering
Intel's inaugural green bond helps us accelerate investment in areas where we can have significant and immediate impact on global environmental issues. Our first green bond impact report highlights how we have allocated $425 million to support Intel’s investments in sustainable operations across five project categories: pollution prevention and control, water stewardship, energy efficiency, renewable energy, and circular economy and waste management.
Empowering the Ecosystem with More-Sustainable Solutions
We collaborate with hundreds of ecosystem partners to create more-sustainable computing solutions, which include applying ICT learnings to help other industries reduce their own footprints.
Modernizing the Energy Grid
We are convening an ecosystem of governments, businesses, and utilities around the globe to transform energy grids and increase access to renewable energy sources. We developed a solution that can be integrated into existing energy grid infrastructure to create a smarter grid that can adapt to changing energy consumption needs and sources. As we help implement smart grids, utilities in the US and Malaysia are experiencing benefits—such as lower capital and operating expenses—that enable more-efficient grid management. To apply smart grid technology to secondary substations, we are working with eight major European electric utilities to create a solution called the Edge for Smart Secondary Substation (E4S) Alliance, which will modernize substations to better support renewable energy sources.
Lowering the Data Center Carbon Footprint
We have teamed up with companies such as Green Revolution Cooling and Submer to pilot liquid immersion cooling deployments for data centers across cloud and communications providers. Immersion cooling in data centers and at the edge can improve power usage effectiveness (PUE) and—through principles such as heat recapture and reuse—provide benefits beyond the data center, such as providing heat for buildings.
Enabling More-Sustainable Network and Edge Solutions
Designed with built-in energy efficiency benefits such as AI-based telemetry and power management tools, our programmable hardware and open software technologies enable more-sustainable intelligent infrastructure, creating Internet of Things (IoT) solutions that help improve green outcomes across industries. For example, within its data center that houses 5G communication facilities, leading Japanese telecommunications operator KDDI reduced overall power consumption by 20% percent in a trial2 using Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and Intel’s comprehensive power management and AI capabilities, giving it the ability to scale power consumption according to demand.
Collaborating on Smart Building Solutions
We’re collaborating with a robust ecosystem of equipment manufacturers and systems integrators to deliver a new generation of smart building solutions built on Intel® IoT technologies. By centralizing building data, smart building solutions can help businesses improve energy efficiency, reduce water waste, and meet and demonstrate compliance with ENERGY STAR goals across operations.
Product and Performance Information
Intel is committed to the continued development of more sustainable products, processes, and supply chains as we strive to prioritize greenhouse gas reduction and improve our global environmental impact. Where applicable, environmental attributes of a product family or specific SKU will be stated with specificity. Refer to the 2022 Corporate Responsibility Report (p. 64) for further information.