AI Efficiency, Green Coding and Tools

• A new open source suite of 49 agent skills, MIT licensed, was released to cut AI cost, carbon and complexity across the coding stack
• Green Coding and Sustainable Coding were framed as different questions entirely, since an optimization reducing one type of impact can quietly create a larger one elsewhere
• FLOPpy, a hardware agnostic library, was launched to give machine learning teams a reproducible way to measure computational cost instead of relying on volatile metrics like execution time
• Sustainable Tokenomics was introduced as a framework, built on Greenpixie calculations, that surfaces the carbon cost sitting beneath every AI prompt's price tag
• Infinity, a caching engine for GAQX, was launched to stop large language models from recomputing answers to questions already resolved elsewhere
• The energy and water cost of a single polite chatbot phrase was calculated, building on Sam Altman's remark that OpenAI has lost tens of millions of dollars in electricity to users saying please and thank you
• Fifteen CNN architectures, including ResNet variants, were trained on Tiny ImageNet, finding that lighter CNNs beat ResNets on CO2 emitted per accuracy point

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Data Centers, Energy and Water Infrastructure

• The University of Montana's old data center, once housed in a converted 1970s bathroom and consuming 8.5 million gallons of water a year, was replaced in a 2020 rebuild with a closed loop, water free system
• AWS became the first cloud provider to show customers their actual water withdrawal, revealing that its data centers use water for cooling only about 10 percent of the year
• A case was made for wooden data centers, arguing engineered timber cuts construction time and lifecycle cost while improving ESG credentials
• Liquid cooling and new chip generations were credited with cutting energy consumption per token by roughly a factor of 10, even as data centers continue straining US power grids
• India's data center capacity, projected to grow from about 1 gigawatt today to over 2 gigawatts by 2030 on more than 15 to 18 billion dollars in investment, is concentrated in already water stressed cities including Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and the NCR
• A Swiss data center built inside a former military command center under 1,500 meters of mountain in canton Uri now hosts servers for private banks and pharmaceutical companies
• Taxpayers Protection Alliance figures show data centers used just 0.2 percent of New York state's water and 3.5 percent of its electricity in 2025

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Enterprise Strategy, Governance and Policy

• Microsoft, Google and Amazon's combined emissions rose 42 percent since 2020, with Microsoft's 2025 sustainability report showing a 25 percent year over year increase compared to 18 percent for Google and 16 percent for Amazon
• A former AWS water program manager in Northern Virginia alleged that AWS's claimed 42 percent year over year water use reduction does not match utility data showing declines of only 0.8 and 32.1 percent
• The EU's revised European Sustainability Reporting Standards cut mandatory data points by more than 60 percent and total data points by more than 70 percent, promising over 30 percent lower compliance costs per company
• An FT report flagged that the EU's planned traffic light rating system for data center energy and water use is being watered down after pushback from big tech companies over cost
• Deutsche Telekom's SAP2SKY cloudification initiative cut energy consumption by 40 percent, alongside a DetoxIT program using Gemini to map and clean up legacy infrastructure
• Reuters analysis showed emissions from xAI's Colossus 2 data center in Tennessee exceed thresholds tied to environmental justice concerns for the surrounding community
• Green ICT is shifting from an ESG reporting exercise into a boardroom level strategy question, as CIOs move from asking how fast they can adopt AI to how sustainably they can scale it

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Events, Community and Conversations

• At the AI for Good Summit in Geneva, it was noted that training a frontier model in Nevada emits 90 times as much carbon as training the same model in France
• A UN High Level Political Forum side event reported that data centers could use 945 terawatt hours of electricity by 2030
• Green IO Munich drew standing room only crowds for sessions on sustainable AI in action
• The fourth stop of the TruePriceOfAI event series took place in Munich, following earlier stops in Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Bremen, drawing almost 50 participants
• At the WeAreDevelopers World Congress, sustainability was noted as barely visible across 16 stages despite heavy attendance at AI agent sessions
• The five day Coding.Waterkant Festival 2026 in Kiel treated AI, open source and green coding as a shared conversation rather than separate tracks

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Thanks to Navveen Balani, Wilco Burggraaf, Francesco Scala, Mark Bradley, Taranjeet, Yasin Kasirga, Isha Hebbar, Zach Rossmiller, Alexis Bateman, Karl Rabe, Nicolas Breyton, Giboy Panicker, Clio Rossier, Lydia Sewell, James Martin, Mark Butcher, Daniel Baumann, Nathaniel Burola, Amir Kangarlou, Dr. Sasha Luccioni, Joydeep D., Malcolm Buckley, Riad Meddeb, Kevin Leslie, Thorsten Jonas, Philipp Kersting and Dirk Schrödter for contributing insights to this edition.

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