There's 'Intel Inside' this water stewardship

The late 1980s marked a massive change in the way end-users the world over were taking to computing, particularly personal computing, leading to an exponential rise in demand for central processing units (CPUs) for computers. A semiconductor chip manufacturer sought to realise the full potential of this tectonic shift in demand for CPUs by the addition of just one simple term to its global branding and the ‘Intel Inside’ campaign was born in 1991. Around the same time, the Santa Clara-based company also realised the importance of nurturing what lay at the very core of its business – water. A single chip requires a little under eight gallons of water to build, and a complete computer needs as much as 20,000 litres.

Over the years, it has achieved net positive water usage at its massive Bengaluru campus, conserving 60 billion gallons of water every year. It has funded external water restoration projects, including two lakes in the city. It has a sustainability lab in the campus and is exploring sustainable computing solutions through the development of what’s referred to as Concept Luna.

“At Intel India, I am proud to see the impact of the actions we are taking to reduce our environmental footprint,” Nivruti Rai, country head Intel India, and vice-president intel foundry services, told Times Techies. Intel restored about 100 million gallons in 2021, against about 25 million gallons used in its operations the same year. The quantum of restored water went up further in 2022.

Lake restoration & rainwater harvestingCLEAN International and Say Trees, the company has restored two degraded lakes, and they now have the potential to add an estimated 120 million gallons of water to the ground level. The rainwater harvesting facility on the Intel India campus collects water in tanks, which is then used for landscape irrigation and industrial purposes. The in-house sewage treatment plants treat the used water from kitchens, wash basins and utility areas. This recycled grey water is further used for flushing toilets and for irrigation. About 5 million gallons of water is recycled every year on Intel campuses across India.

Sustainability lab

The sustainability lab enhances product repairability, reliability and reusability at every stage of design, manufacturing and usage of chips. This is ensured through measurement tools that quantify the embodied carbon in Intel reference designs for PCs, computing platforms and systems by applying component reduction technologies, responsible mineral and material choices, and tuning workloads for energy efficiency.

Gokul Subramanian, vice-president of the client computing group (CCG) at Intel, who also leads sustainability initiatives for CCG, says sustainability is an integrated engineering capability that Intel uses to build and deliver products.

With an eye on developing sustainable computing, Intel has also entered into a collaboration with Dell and developed a prototype for a sustainable PC called Concept Luna, which uses accessible, replaceable and reusable components. Accelerating circular economy commitments and achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions are at the heart of Concept Luna (see box).

Bloom box for energy

Intel India was the first in the country to use Bloom Energy’s solid oxide fuel cells. Bloom boxes use an input fuel like natural gas that goes through a chemical process in the presence of air to produce electricity, without creating any harmful byproducts. About 65% of the energy needs of the company are met by alternative energy sources such as fuel cells and solar energy.