BT has expanded its Carbon Network Dashboard to provide business customers with detailed insights into electricity consumption and carbon emissions at the workload and application level. This enhancement allows businesses to optimise their data-centre and network infrastructure, particularly as they scale up the use of AI applications.

AI applications can significantly impact networks and data-centres, causing unpredictable spikes in bandwidth demand and power usage. These spikes can overload network devices and servers, leading to performance issues and increased electricity waste. The Carbon Network Dashboard now offers a near real-time view of electricity usage, linking it to specific application traffic patterns, including those generated by AI.

BT’s sustainable network design and refresh service leverages this data to help customers adapt their network design, capacity, and management. The Dashboard’s new capabilities include identifying traffic to colocation or public cloud services and optimising for flexible capacity. Additionally, it now incorporates electricity consumption data from a broader range of network equipment, enhancing energy management and carbon savings through tools like V-App IoT builder integration and zero-touch automation.

Sarwar Khan, BT’s Sustainability Director, highlighted that while AI holds great promise, it can also strain digital infrastructure, leading to increased electricity use and carbon emissions if not managed properly. BT aims to support customers in achieving sustainable growth by using the Carbon Network Dashboard to help them scale AI adoption while optimising their infrastructure to meet decarbonisation targets. This initiative demonstrates BT’s commitment to backing their customers.