M&SOM Practice Platform

Carbon-Aware Computing @ Google, and Beyond

Abstract

The growing climate impact of increased Greenhouse Gas Emissions and CO2 levels in Earth's atmosphere highlights the value and importance of technologies that reduce such impact. Electricity generation is a significant contributor to global CO2 emissions, and the data center industry is expected to reach anywhere from 3 to 13% of global electricity demand by 2030. Data centers can facilitate grid decarbonization in a manner different from isolated power loads, and Google has set on a mission to increase and scale carbon awareness via new technology solutions. We present an overview and enhancements of Google's Carbon-Intelligent Computing System, and discuss technical challenges associated with increasing and harnessing temporal and spatial flexibility of diverse workloads running in Google data centers. Furthermore, we share some insights from building systems that leverage different types of workload flexibility to effectively increase resource efficiency and reduce environmental impact, while meeting infrastructure and application SLOs. Finally, we pause some key, open questions from our investigations of load shaping strategies aimed not only to reduce grid-level emissions, but contribute to energy systems' more resilient, robust and cost-efficient decarbonization.

Presenter: Ana Radovanovic

Ana Radovanovic has been a research scientist at Google since early 2008, after she earned her PhD Degree in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University (2005) and worked for 3 years as a Research Staff Member in the Mathematical Sciences Department at IBM TJ Watson Research Center. For more than 12 years, Ana Radovanovic has focused all her research efforts at Google on building innovative technologies and business models with two goals in mind: (i) to deliver more reliable, affordable and clean electricity to everyone in the world, and (ii) to help Google become a thought leader in decarbonizing the electricity grid. Nowadays, Ana is widely recognized as a technical lead and research entrepreneur. She is a Senior Staff Research Scientist, serving as a Technical Lead for Energy Analytics and Carbon Aware Computing at Google.

---

This seminar took place on June 18, 2025. The PDF of the webinar chat log is available here. An online discussion forum has been set up through the INFORMS YouTube channel in order to facilitate further interactions with the seminar presenters and organizers for a period of three months following the seminar.

If you have any trouble accessing any content on this page, please contact the managing editor, Machelle Zellers, at [email protected].

Back to M&SOM's Practice Platform home page.