HP Innovation Journal Issue 11: Winter 2018 | Page 67

As economies grow, so does their use of energy. Increased
product demand and use lead to a greater consumption of
energy to power the explosion of new devices, data, and their
deployment. This can come at a cost, however, as energy
consumption can lead to greater CO2 emissions and a strain
on our environment.
Data movement is one of the largest energy consumers and
that consumption is growing at a staggering rate, considering
that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day. With
sensors being added to all types of devices—from cars to
airplanes to farming equipment—it’s becoming impossible
for internet bandwidth and cloud services to keep up with
real-time data movement and analysis. In fact, by 2025,
six times more data per year will be generated by edge
computing devices, and 95% of that data will be trapped
because of bandwidth limitations.
Even if the computing infrastructure could keep up, data
transfer is a highly energy-intensive part of computing, and
the drain on resources would be significant. As an example, a
single artificial intelligence workstation uses 1.4 times more
energy than the average U.S. home.
The accelerating pace of change coupled with continued
population growth, urbanization, changing demographics,
and hyper globalization will only widen these gaps between
population needs and the resources to support them. The
world will have to get much faster, cheaper, and better at
meeting those needs, making it critical for companies like
HP, our customers, and partners to look for new ways and
innovations to drive growth, productivity, and efficiency well
into the future.
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