CRN Deep Dive: Sustainability and AI, the unlikely duo impacting the channel industry

Sustainability hasn’t taken a backseat, in fact, it’s chugging along, and has a new friend: AI.

Sustainability used to be the hot button topic, it was all anyone could speak about at tech conferences. But as now, every man and his dog is talking about AI.

But these two ideas, while seemingly looking like nemeses, are being used together to help partners, distributors and data centres to create a better environment, workplace and policies.

To many organisations and leaders, AI is seen as the gas guzzler of the tech industry.

An EY study all but confirms this noting that AI uses up energy, creates greenhouse gas emissions, consumes water through data centres and can create a considerable amount of e-waste.

While all this might be true, on the flip side, AI’s seemingly pollutant powers could be used for good.

By 2030, the European Parliament’s Think Tank estimates that AI could be harnessed to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 1.5-4 percent.

Closer to home, partners and other players in the channel are using AI’s strengths to become more sustainable.

Navneesh Garg, CEO at solution provider Adactin said, “The sustainability conversation is evolving alongside AI creating both new opportunities and fresh challenges for the channel.

“As AI-driven insights mature, partners will be better positioned to measure, optimise, and report on sustainability outcomes in meaningful ways.”

Garg noted that AI has a “dual impact” on sustainability.

“On one hand, it provides powerful tools to monitor and reduce waste, optimise resource usage, and drive more efficient operations.

“On the other hand, the high-performance computing required to run advanced AI agents can have significant environmental costs, including high energy and water consumption.

“Balancing these benefits and challenges will be critical for organisations and partners looking to deploy AI responsibly,” he added.

Guy Danskine, managing director at Equinix Australia said the data centre company sees AI as part of the solution to build a more sustainable digital future.

“It drives us to be bolder in the way we both connect and protect our world,” he said.

Using AI to help with sustainability

According to the Boston Consulting Group, AI can contribute to climate action by reducing emissions, guiding adaptations to unavoidable climate change impacts, and providing foundational capabilities that enable climate action.

Danskine at Equinix said the data centre implements AI tools to monitor and adjust power use based on real-time needs and avoiding resource wastage.

“In many ways, AI has reinforced why sustainability needs to be front and centre of infrastructure design, to make sure the digital transformation it drives is also a sustainable one,” he said.

One of the roles Craig Howe, CEO at V2 AI has is educating and enabling his customers around using AI for ESG purposes.

He explained some of the ways AI can be used to help companies be sustainable.

"Automation and insight, whether it's corporate disclosures or real time dashboards, can provide that visibility, find those efficiencies and connect it to an updated sustainability agenda as well as support your risk prevention and compliance,” he explained.

“Supply chain transparency, identifying, risks, labour issues, hot spots and things that you wouldn't be able to uncover manually by trawling through the data.

“Even, ‘what if’ scenarios around simulations for decarbonisation, from an environmental perspective, as well as governance and decision support.”

Some organisations are using AI-based financial programs, like FinOps to help hit sustainability and ESG targets.

At Tech Data, they are using AI within their new FinOps practice to help their partners and end users to drive cost reductions.

Robbie Upcroft, country manager ANZ at the distie said, “It's kind of ironic using AI to get better cost economics out of AI, but we have to.

“Because more customers, they've swung so far to the cloud, the bills are going through the roof.

“The impact on that is their boards are saying, ‘we're spending so much on cloud and how is that impacting our ESG goals? We need to reduce our cloud spend, but we can't reduce our productivity’.”

Upcroft said FinOps becomes the way that as a distie they speak to their partners to do things more cost effectively for them.

"It does ironically, lead to a reduction in the revenue that we see, but better relationships with our partners and ultimately their customers,” he added.

A small, large data centre problem

AI needs power to run, and where that power comes from is usually data centres. In Australia, there are more than 210 data centres across the country that are utilised by partners, vendors and disties alike.

Data centres use a lot of power, water and infrastructure, to ensure businesses are up and running.

A report from the International Energy Agency showed that data centre electricity consumption is set to more than double to around 945 TWh by 2030. The report said AI is the most important driver of this growth, alongside growing demand for other digital services.

Danskine at Equinix acknowledges this and said, “AI is accelerating demand for high-performance digital infrastructure – and with that comes a responsibility to ensure it is energy-efficient and sustainable.”

Data centres – like Equinix – are working towards becoming more sustainable.

In 2024, Danskine explained that Equinix achieved 96 percent renewable energy coverage globally, marking the seventh consecutive year above 90 percent, and he said they improved their average global power usage effectiveness (PUE) to 1.39 – about a 6 percent gain on the previous year.

“Here in Australia, we’ve taken a major step forward by signing our first long-term Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with TagEnergy for 151 MW of renewable energy from the Golden Plains Wind Farm – East, which will cover our 17 IBX data centres across the country in 2029,” he said.

“Across the industry, we’re seeing sustainability targets backed by tangible projects like this – proof that environmental responsibility is being built into core infrastructure decisions, not just discussed as an aspiration.”

Future thinking

Garg at Adactin noted that while the business benefits of AI are significant, vendors must also consider the long-term environmental impact.

“This includes investing in research and development of more energy and resource efficient technologies, such as next-generation GPUs,” he said.

“Just as vendors invest in enhancing AI capabilities, they also need to prioritise sustainability in their infrastructure and product development to ensure that growth in AI adoption doesn’t come at the expense of the planet.”

Howe at V2 AI explained that building a responsibility and ethics framework in AI, would most likely help a partner’s sustainability agenda.

“I look at the positive sides of AI and how you can really use it to accelerate things. ESG is not going to go away, it's just going to evolve. And you may as well use all the material, and tap into the inputs of AI to make it happen.”

While there is still a long way to go, Danskine explained that the industry is moving in the right direction.

“The key now is to keep that momentum going – through collaboration, innovation, and continued investment in projects that make sustainability tangible and scalable,” he ended.