Ant Group announced today that according to calculations by China Environmental United Certification, it was able to cut its data centers’ electricity consumption by 640 megawatt-hours during this year’s 11.11 Global Shopping Festival from November 1 to November 11, thanks to a range of new green computing technologies.
The use of these technologies contributed to reducing carbon emissions by 394 tons over the 11-day period, equivalent to the daily emissions of about 30,000 gas and diesel cars.
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The green computing technologies, including online-offline hybrid deployment, cloud-native time-shared scheduling and AI-based auto scaling, allow data centers to provide computing resources as efficiently as possible and ensure applications have access to the computing power they need, while avoiding servers running idle. Using these technologies, data centers can support more business demands with fewer servers, maximize their utilization of computing resources, minimize wasted electricity, and reduce energy intensity.
Ni Xingjun, Chief Technology Officer of Ant Group, said: “As a leading payment platform providing comprehensive services to hundreds of millions of users every day, Alipay needs to support massive computing tasks around the clock while ensuring reliability and security. We not only pay attention to the capacity of our computing system, but also its energy efficiency, and are always committed to developing and deploying more and more innovative green computing technologies.”
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Fueling today’s digital economy, data centers consume a large amount of electricity, which also comes with carbon emissions. Ant Group began exploring application of innovative technologies to improve its data centers’ operational efficiency in 2019. Since then, it has more than doubled its data centers’ server utilization rate.
In March 2021, Ant Group pledged to become carbon neutral by 2030. In addition to reducing carbon emissions with green technologies, Ant Group also launched several campaigns during the 11.11 Global Shopping Festival to encourage green activities. MYbank, an online private commercial bank and associate of Ant Group, announced an initiative enabling merchants to shorten their accounts receivable turnover period for certified green products. Moreover, Alipay Ant Forest, a tree-planting mini-program within the Alipay app, also worked with brands and offered incentives to consumers for choosing energy-efficient home appliances.
