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#47a - The Microsoft Azure dilemma with Holly and William Alpine - Learnings from a 10K employee grassroots sustainability initiative

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They both went to this job interview to hone their skills, and got a dream job at Microsoft! In its fast-growing and AI-pioneered Azure division and with a romance on top of it… 💕
Yet several years later, Holly and Will Alpine decided to both resign. Why? On sustainability ground, and more specifically for the lack of support on the “enabled emissions” issues. 🕵️
Holly and Will are now the Bonnie & Clyde of Azure and they provide us with an insider perspective, in a nuanced and well-documented way, on this “elephant in the room” in all big tech companies: are their sustainability claims offset by the so-called enabled emissions? 🐘
In this first part of this 2-part episode, Holly and Will shared great insights with Gaël Duez on:
🌱 Microsoft’s employee grassroot sustainability initiative which gathers now more than ten thousands people
⚖️ The opportunity cost for most middle management to support sustainability initiatives
🛠️ The difference between attributional and consequential methodologies and why it impacts the adoption of SCI enabled tools
💰 Can investing millions in local community support justify the increasing data center expansion?
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Holly and Will's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

Transcript (auto-generated)

Gaël Duez (01:53.354)

Today, I'm joined by the Bonnie and Clyde of Microsoft Azure, two experts in their respective fields who had a dream job in a company which they were proud of working for with significant achievements in their missions as well as their internal volunteering activities in the sustainability field and a romance on top of it. Yet, they decided to quit because of what they called Microsoft hypocrisy on AI.

And here we are talking about millions of tons of greenhouse gases that should not be emitted and are enabled by tech solutions based on machine learning. The exchange I had with Holly Alpine and Will Alpine was so rich that I decided to split it into two episodes. They brought very complimentary perspectives. Holly being the former head of Microsoft Data Center Community Environmental Sustainability and Employee Engagement. And being now on the board of directors of both American Forest and Zero Waste Washington, and by the way, being listed in the green biz 30 under 30, la valeur n'attend pas le nombre des années, as we say in French.

And Will, being a seasoned AI product manager, also in charge of driving sustainability within Azure across the operational machine learning lifecycle. So bringing a more technical aspect to our discussion. Shall I also add, he's a serious contributor to the software carbon intensity specification as I discovered in the episode.

One last word before we start. I know I used a catchy statement to introduce the episode and the word hypocrisy is a very strong one. But I was impressed in our discussion how nuanced and balanced were their positions and their claims. Everyone in the tech industry should take a time to pose and reflect on the dilemma they raised because it's not at all a Microsoft only debate.

Hello Will, Hello Holly, very nice to have you on the show.

Great to finally have a recording on three different time zones. So we made it. Thanks to you and welcome to the show.

Will (07:49.437)

Thanks for having us.

Holly Alpine (07:51.366)

Thank you, glad to be here.

Gaël Duez (07:54.07)

Yeah, I'm especially happy regarding Will because Will at the moment, if I'm not wrong, you're at sea. Am I right?

Will (08:04.495)

I am currently on a Sea Shepherd ship in Tasmania. We're doing a refit to prepare the ship for an Arctic voyage. So we're not on the open ocean, but I am on a boat that is floating on the water.

Gaël Duez (08:17.344)

Okay, pretty cool. What are you doing there?

Will (08:21.459)

This is part of a campaign to refit a boat from an old fishing vessel into one that's used to fight illegal fishing. So I'm fighting poetic justice in the work that we're doing.

Gaël Duez (08:31.842)

Well, that's pretty cool. how an engineer, a software engineer or data scientist, I don't know which hat do you want to wear these days, how can you contribute to this kind of campaign?

Will (08:46.459)

So my past life, I was actually a blacksmith and I picked up skills of welding and fabrication. And then I worked as a mechanical engineer. So I'm actually getting to contribute those to the mission here. It's really nice to reconnect with old selves.

Gaël Duez (09:02.294)

I can imagine how cool is this. Okay, but let's go back to your old days. I've got thousands of questions to unpack with you. We will try to make it in one, maybe two episodes exceptionally, we'll see. Maybe just before to deep dive in all the different issues you've raised regarding Azure solutions at Microsoft, maybe could you explain us both of you a bit?

What is to work at Microsoft and especially in the data center division? It's huge, maybe Oli, can you share some numbers to grasp the magnitude of its operations?

Holly Alpine (09:45.382)

Sure, Microsoft employees, last time I checked about 150,000 people and that's all over the world. We have countless different divisions and different programs and it's particularly with sustainability. They have a corporate sustainability team, but what we were really trying to do is embed sustainability into everything that we did all across the company. a couple years ago, Microsoft was the most profitable company on the planet Earth.

Gaël Duez (10:20.0)

That's pretty huge. And regarding the size, maybe, Will you can comment on this, the size of the data center operation and the flagship solution, which is Azure. How big is it? I think it's a solid number two behind AWS. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Will (10:37.075)

believe you're correct. Azure has about 20 % of the global cloud market. so Azure's revenue was about 32 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023, and it covers the entire globe. So the operations and the scale is quite staggering.

Gaël Duez (11:03.667)

Will you meant 32 billions for the entire Microsoft revenue with Azure accounting? For roughly 40 % of it. Am I correct?

Will (11:24.722)

That's my understanding, yes.

Gaël Duez (11:38.807)

Well, that's pretty impressive. And regarding the tech stack, I how many data centers, how many, I mean, don't share any confidential information. It could be by order of magnitude, but are we talking about 550, 500, 5,000 hyperscaler facilities worldwide?

Will (11:56.594)

You know, that's a great question. Actually, according to an article by the Washington Post, it's more than 2,700 data centers nationwide. And a lot of them are from shops that are actually renting out their compute to the hyperscalers. So I can't give you any specifics of the scale of Microsoft specific operations, but the number is in the thousands for data centers.

Gaël Duez (12:15.829)

in the thousands just for the US. Wow, that's pretty impressive.

Holly Alpine (12:21.497)

And a number that I saw the other day was that Microsoft is opening a new data center every three days.

Gaël Duez (12:29.651)

every three days. it's not necessarily building it up from scratch, but it's like opening by using data center providers solutions, but opening a new location. Is it right? Or is it also stuff that they are building up from the ground?

Holly Alpine (12:48.783)

I think that includes both, it is a combination of different classes, call it class A, B, or C, where it's either Microsoft completely owning the land, they purchase the land, build the data center from scratch, they're buying a building that already exists, but they're putting their servers inside of it, or they're leasing space in co-owned facilities, or some combination.

Gaël Duez (13:17.483)

Well, that's pretty huge. And just before to jump on this question of the energy consumption, which is very related to all these data centers, popping up like Mushroom, I was just visiting two weeks ago for a client that I will not disclose the name, a very significant, like one of the main data centers north of Paris.

And it reminds me how huge these facilities are. It's a huge client. mean, they've got a lot of their own servers. They're doing like millions of compute per seconds. So it's pretty impressive. And that was just a tiny part of a, not even the smaller part of the big data centers. And just thinking that we're talking about thousands of them, it's pretty impressive. And fun

One of the ideas they got after a workshop that we did two weeks ago is we should have every employee visiting the data center again, just to remind people what is at stake here and how big it is, is almost invisible to most employees. I was pretty

Will (14:29.244)

You know, that's my one regret from my time at Microsoft. I never managed to make a data center visit.

Gaël Duez (14:35.063)

Really?

Holly Alpine (14:36.827)

they're pretty hard to go to. now it's pretty impossible to go visit. I used to, based on the work that I was doing, I got to see them in various stages of construction and yeah, they are massive. mean, they're football fields long. You have to drive a car around just the campus. They're so big.

And you know, they're in communities my main role at Microsoft was looking at the impact to the communities where Microsoft data centers were located and how we could give back and try to be a good neighbor.

Gaël Duez (15:21.271)

I think we will go on this field, a soccer field or a football field, no jealous. need to pay attention to whoever is listening. So my dear American based friend, let's talk about football, but for the rest of the world, let's talk about soccer. Anyway, I've got maybe two last questions to understand the context

Do you have any figures regarding the energy consumption? And I know it's just tip of the iceberg, the energy, but the energy consumption of all these data centers providing the Azure solution worldwide.

Will (16:09.832)

You know, it's a great question and one that's really important and is getting quite a lot of media coverage as of now. I actually spent four years at Microsoft really advocating strongly to reduce the carbon and energy footprint of technology at Microsoft. And so I did want to define the terminology. I will call this the operational emissions. That's from the building and the hosting of the data center. And so by 2030 data centers are expected to use around three to 13 % of global electricity. As compared to 1 % in 2010. And I do want to emphasize the wide range there is because analysts are quietly revising their projections here because simply put, no one knows what the impact really is.

Gaël Duez (16:54.807)

which is an issue in itself. deep dive maybe on your time at Microsoft and what you did. And let's start maybe with a simple question, Why did you join Microsoft, which seemed to be a dream job? I recall Holly, you were featured in a Fortune article quote recently and the quote was, “I love my job at Microsoft, but I had to resign on principles. Here's why.” You loved your job. Why did you join this job, please?

Holly Alpine (17:54.137)

Microsoft is a fantastic place to work in so many ways. I really joined Microsoft because of its great reputation. Back then, it wasn't really a sustainability focus. I actually, when I first joined Microsoft, didn't really think of Microsoft in a sustainability capacity at all. I was passionate about sustainability, but just thought that I would need to volunteer outside of my day job. But as I continued at Microsoft over the next 10 years, I met some truly incredible people who were working on sustainability day in, day out, and I was able to create my own roles in sustainability at Microsoft. I started on Microsoft's energy team and our cloud operations and innovation team, basically the data center team. And then I was able to found a new program called Community Environmental Sustainability that was in that same organization. I developed it back in 2017 and was able to invest in nature-based solutions in the global communities where those data centers were operating. And it was fantastic. And I met hundreds, if of people across the company who were very passionate, intelligent, and were really embedding sustainability into everything we did as a company.

I can speak more to the employee engagement program that I was leading as well, but in my time there, there's so much good to say about Microsoft. I think Will had a pretty good experience there too, yeah Will?

Will (19:40.196)

I actually joined by way of a happy accident. I was attending and graduating from the University of Washington's Global Exchange program and I was at that moment simply practicing for interviews and I decided to sign up for Microsoft interview and then when I went in it was actually a great experience and I was when I received the offer I became really excited because it was an offer to join the Azure AI platform group which was a really really exciting and innovative place to be and I saw this as a huge lever to make positive change and really impact society at scale and really work with novel technology. So really chasing the promise of impact and innovation.

Holly Alpine (20:27.695)

You know, that's funny. I don't think I actually knew that well, because I don't know if you know this either, but my interview with Microsoft, I was seeing it as just practice as well. I was in college and even though I had great grades, I just thought, you know, it's Microsoft. There's no way I'm going to be able to get a job there. And so I just went into it thinking it was just practice, but lo and behold, I got the job. And I'm so glad that I didn't skip that interview.

Will (20:54.706)

Same here.

Gaël Duez (20:56.225)

That's pretty cool. I think that's a first tip for students and job seekers. Go for your dream interview. Maybe it's practice, but you might eventually land on your dream job. That's a very cool story. And that's quite funny that it happened to both of so these years at Microsoft were very fruitful in terms of sustainability achievements.

You mentioned the employee engagement. It seems to be a pretty big success. I think the numbers were in 10 of thousands. Could you explain us what it was about and why it was so important, how you managed to achieve such a huge number of people gathered in a community, a sustainability community?

Holly Alpine (21:50.747)

Yeah, so it was kind of born out of a sense of almost loneliness and wanting to find community. I knew that there were other people at Microsoft who cared about sustainability. There had to be. We just hadn't been able to find each other. And it turned out there were. We just needed a platform to connect. And so a colleague and I, back in about 2017, founded Microsoft's employee engagement group for sustainability. It was a platform for employees to come together and really be able to engage in the ways that made sense for them. I think what made it so successful was that it was so grassroots grassroots. It was really born out of the programs that we wanted to see as employees and how we wanted to connect and how we wanted to contribute. And so we had many different programs that helped employees to learn more about sustainability. You know, it's a really big topic and there's a lot to learn. So we had various speaker series and different meetings to bring in various experts in their fields. We also had various platforms for employees to really contribute, to start their own projects and to find others who wanted to join their projects. And this could be employees from all across the world and all across the company who otherwise wouldn't have ever maybe been able to meet. it really caught on. And we, as you said, grew the program to over 10,000 employees and across 37 global chapters. And it was really enabling positive environmental change at every level of the company.

Gaël Duez (23:37.492)

Could you share some some success stories because I understand the idea of gathering a lot of people like minded people in training them or raising their awareness raising their skills in sustainability topics but how did it concretely contributes to changing things at Microsoft?

Holly Alpine (23:59.865)

Yeah, I guess two main things that I'll bring up are we had every year hackathons where we would bring organizations from outside of Microsoft or just form teams within Microsoft and really pick a topic and actually take a week and really make change and have an impact. And actually, I'll pass this on to Will. Will, do you wanna talk about the hackathon that you did that you won? Last year, right? Can you, you want to talk about that?

Will (24:32.754)

Sure, actually my last day at Microsoft was presenting the winning hackathon to the chief sustainability officer along with the team. And this was a really special moment for me because it was the culmination of everything I had been working on for the past four years. And so I'll step back a second. When I first joined, I also plugged into the sustainability connected community and I was seeking like-minded folks. And so we ended up doing a hackathon. And actually on that hackathon were several people who were profoundly influential to my career, including Asim Hussain, who's the chair of the Green Software Foundation. And so as you might imagine, that lit a fire within me and built the community that was so instrumental to our successes later. And so to make a long story short, several of the things that we did, we more or less graduated this set of hackathons into what is now the Carbonware SDK at the Green Software Foundation.

And I see this as a massive win, specifically on behalf of the employees that have contributed to this, and because it has reached megaton scale carbon avoidance potential and is seeing production applications with several Fortune 500 companies, including Vestas and UBS. So check out the Green Software Foundation's Carbonware SDK if you're curious.

Gaël Duez (25:52.257)

I didn't know you were involved that much in the GSF. Fun fact is that I was with Assim last week in Green IO London. I should have told him that, hey, I'm going to have Will Alpine on the show pretty soon.

Will (25:59.653)

Awesome

Holly Alpine (26:19.481)

I would say another major success that we had as a sustainability community was that in no small part, Microsoft's employee community played a role in Microsoft's sustainability commitments. The carbon, water, waste, and ecosystems commitments that Microsoft is so famous for in sustainability what really propelled them to be seen as a leader across the globe.

And sustainability was in no small part because of employee pressure and employees asking their employer and largely through this community, how can we be better? How can we really show up, put our money where our mouth is and really show up as a company that is leading in sustainability?

Gaël Duez (27:14.517)

Hmm. And that was you.

Will (27:15.59)

And I'll just add something really quickly unto what Holly was saying. I think so much of the fantastic sustainability work that's happening at Microsoft is on behalf of volunteers who are really doing this work out of dedication and passion. And there are thousands at the company and all of this really accrues to the brand reputation of Microsoft and is featured prominently in the annual sustainability report, which is seen as the gold standard for sustainability reports.

Gaël Duez (27:42.555)

So many roads I'd love to follow from that point, but I would like to ask two questions.

So first question is, you mentioned that the community groups had a significant influence on how the sustainability goals from Microsoft were designed and published. My question would be, how does this Sustainability community or these different Sustainability groups interact with the official, I would say, Sustainability team or teams maybe at Microsoft, like the Chief Sustainability Officer. Does she or he has regular contact with the different groups? Are the volunteers included in work group? And how is the workflow going? And is it based more on tension, collaboration, sometimes a bit of both? How does it work?

Holly Alpine (29:40.559)

Yeah, so the chief sustainability officer of Microsoft, so was formerly Lucas Joppa and now it's Melanie Nakagawa. We met with them quarterly, at least with Lucas, we met quarterly and really discussed employees' top priorities. We would send out surveys to employees to try to understand what their main priorities were, what they wanted to see, how they thought Microsoft could be better, and then we would meet with directly with the CSO and discuss and decide what was possible and they would take some stuff forward and at the next meeting we would talk about where the progress was and what they thought was not possible. It really felt collaborative. I do think at times it maybe felt more collaborative than it actually was. I think we can get into that when we really get into the beans of this podcast today around our Enabled Admissions Initiative is that a lot of the promises that were made did ultimately go unfulfilled. But when we were meeting with them, it did feel very collaborative and open. Would you agree with that, Will?

Will (31:03.208)

I would say that's fair to say.

Gaël Duez (31:08.808)

Okay, so I got it now. It's very important because I see a lot of this grassroots movement in many companies. And at the beginning, they're kind of welcomed by top management. But when you have to start interacting in a bit more structured way, this is where the momentum get lost most of the time and people are moving from an advocate position to an opponent position. And I know that is something that we will talk about a bit later in this episode. My second question and sorry to put it that blankly because being US based and I guess Microsoft is such a, it's a household name all over the world, but especially in the US. But from a bit of an external perspective, what did you make so sure that Microsoft was a leading force in the sustainability area?

Holly Alpine (33:04.123)

Well, I joined before Microsoft was really a leader in sustainability and really before sustainability was even part of really their top considerations as a company. And so I saw the evolution over time. And I do think that Microsoft has made some really laudable commitments around carbon, water, waste and ecosystems. I mean, they were potentially the first major company anyway to commit to going carbon negative, meaning that they'll sequester more carbon than they produce, that including Scope 1, 2, and 3. I I do think that that is a very impressive commitment. We think that they need to go farther, but that is very impressive goal.

Same with water, trying to be water positive, being zero waste and protecting more land than they use by 2030. Those are all goals that, of course, they could always do more, but if every company on the planet did at least those, we would be in a lot better position than we are now.

Will (34:24.284)

And I'd like to add a bit of context from someone who's really driving the grassroots sustainability initiatives at Microsoft. When I joined, was really, it wasn't in my formal job description in any sense, but it was definitely part of the decision is the image that Microsoft had been projecting in some of the bold commitments that had made. And so I was really, really eager to join. I will caveat this with saying, when you join a company with very, very ambitious top-down commitments, it's really important to ensure that company also connects it down to the boots on the ground, so to speak. So one of the challenges that I faced and many currently face today is that there are no sustainability OKRs. That's objectives and key results for certain business groups. So let's say if you join Azure AI, unless an employee can trace the work that they're doing to a specific objective of that business group, then it's going to be really nearly impossible to get traction.

So there's a top down that needs to meet a bottoms up approach.

Gaël Duez (35:27.079)

That's a very important point, not having OKR, if I understood you right, you had on one side very strong overall goals like we want to be carbon negative, want to be water negative, etc. Obviously, what you described as super strong grassroots movements of good willing people dedicating quite a lot of time to move the sustainability efforts in the right directions.

And in the middle, the operational, like meeting this overall strategy aspiration and with this bottom-up energy gathering, in the middle, you have to have some operational setup, whether it's OKR, whether it's dashboards, whether it's some bandwidth allocated to sustainable topics in roadmaps or backlog or whatever. And this is maybe where that was not that easy, that convenient to set up. Am I right to rephrase this like this?

Will (36:29.832)

That's exactly right. The middle layer is the operational layer and that's so crucial to actually get sustainability right. And I don't think many companies frankly are doing it today. I believe Alcoa might be one of the only examples I know of sustainability OKRs for certain groups.

Holly Alpine (36:45.202)

I will say as a volunteer myself, and then leading a massive team of volunteers, of program leads and chapter leads around the world, if that's not part of their actual job description or their leadership doesn't value it, it's going to be the first thing to go when there's time pressure on these employees. So we had super passionate volunteers who really wanted to help

But when things got busy, we just wouldn't hear from them anymore for a time because they just couldn't. their leadership would, it's an opportunity cost for them. Their leadership, they would pass them up for review if they spent their time on sustainability and because they saw it as detracting from their time that could be spent on the objectives for their business group.

Gaël Duez (37:43.093)

Now that's super valuable.

Will (37:43.206)

I second that opportunity cost. If you could really bypass that and make it so that employees making these contributions did not accrue an opportunity cost, I think we'd see real transformation in sustainability. And also I just fact checked myself. I mentioned Alcoa. Actually, that's a different type of accountability. That is actually executive compensation as an incentive. So 20 % of executive compensation is based on progress towards specific sustainability goals. So that is actually simply a tops down method. So I'm not aware of any company that has rolled out sustainability OKRs across their entire line of operations.

Gaël Duez (38:54.799)

Okay, just before we start talking about the elephant in the room and all the papers and the news coverage you got recently, I've got two final questions regarding you in the Azure division before you left. And my first one might be for Will.

You were running, you were driving the sustainability effort within Azure Machine Learning across all the operational machine learning life cycle. And could you maybe give us a bit more details and concrete examples on what is it to do such a job or such volunteering missions, because maybe that was not part of your job description.

Will (39:47.624)

Correct, my official job title was product manager in the Azure AI group and it had nothing to do with sustainability until the very end in which a mentor was very kind and brought me in to his team on the Responsible AI team with a 50 % sustainability focus. But what I was really doing was trying to apply the basic principles of green software engineering. We call it green AI into the Azure AI, Azure machine learning operational life cycle.

The tenets here are you can reduce energy, the energy consumption of your software, you can shift your software to consume cleaner energy. And the third is you can consume fewer physical resources with that software. for me, the baseline effort and it was significant challenge that we faced was how do you provide transparency on even a single piece of the equation there? So one of the wins we actually did as we released energy consumption for Azure Machine Learning. That's in the product today and that shows developers what is the cost of training or inference. You can see that in the studio. That took quite a lot of work just to get out the We actually use that to apply the software carbon intensity specification from the Green Software Foundation to apply it to machine learning models.

And so we published that paper in partnership with Allen Institute for AI and Carnegie Mellon and Hebrew University of New Jerusalem. And just one finding there is that training a large language model has the carbon equivalent of a rail car of coal being burned. I'll share the link for that paper if anyone's curious.

Gaël Duez (41:32.343)

Yeah, that will be awesome because as I often mentioned, all the papers, links, references that are mentioned in the episode will be put in the show notes Just to clarify, these SCI specifications, were they made available to every data scientist at Microsoft or is it also every users of Azure solution can have access to a module where they're based on the SCI. They can get the carbon emission of training their model.

Will (42:11.378)

Good point. Thanks for letting me clarify. So the only thing that is in the product today that any user of Azure Machine Learning could use is the transparency on the energy consumption. The application of the software carbon intensity spec, that was manual. And so we did that and then we published our findings in a paper called On Measuring the Carbon of Machine Learning in Cloud Instances.

Gaël Duez (42:36.469)

Were there any clients asking to get this information?

Will (42:49.724)

There were several clients that were asking, but it was always a ruthless prioritization exercise.

Gaël Duez (42:56.404)

Okay.

Will (42:57.318)

But from a technical perspective, it's very possible. There's no reason you could not apply the SEI and roll it out across the entire stack or show it in your operational or business reporting for a given product line in Azure.

Gaël Duez (43:13.527)

Okay, that's a very strong statement because it means that technically it's feasible. It's really a question, as you said, of a prioritization and why you allocate your time and effort, whether it's to bring more visibility and awareness on the carbon issues or is it on other features that are asked by the clients?

Will (43:35.831)

Of prioritization, but I also want to add it's a point of methodology. And there's a difference between attributional and consequential methodologies that I won't go into on this episode, but methodology has become a political act.

Gaël Duez (43:52.447)

Actually, I would love you to go down that rabbit hole because we hear more and more this debate between attributional and consequential allocation. And when you state that is becoming political, that's definitely something that I want you to elaborate a bit more on.

Will (44:35.368)

Okay, so the software carbon intensity specification is a consequential methodology. So it measures the change as a result of an action or an intervention that say a user could take. But most carbon reporting today is actually attributional. You come up with a top-down figure of perhaps your carbon footprint using your energy consumption of your data center, and then you divide that and you attribute that to a specific line of business. And so it becomes very challenging to come up with the right attributional proxy. I've heard sometimes of cost being used as a proxy to allocate carbon and that has several drawbacks. Sometimes you could use energy, but fundamentally you need to make the investments in the data collection and the telemetry to be able to even get there. And so without a massive investment, which is a prioritization exercise into the sufficient telemetry, then you don't prioritize the methodology development and the tools needed to really provide the transparency to unlock, say, the SCI.

Gaël Duez (45:51.607)

just making sure that I understood it correctly, what you're telling us is that it requires significant investments from the methodology perspective to get the SCI right, because we try to make it consequential, not attributional. Am I right, or is it the other way around?

Will (46:17.605)

Correct. So at a very simplistic level, if you were to look at, let's say, Microsoft Submissions Impact Dashboard, you really couldn't see anything below the surface level there of what the top line emissions are. You could not drill down anymore. And that's because you would need the granular enough data to really understand it, as well as the specific types of consequential accounting and the methodology behind it to back it up. So you need the data, you need the methodology, and you need the funding.

Gaël Duez (46:48.87)

Okay, got it. Thanks lot for the clarification. What did you state it was becoming political? It's just a question of resource allocation or there are other topics there.

Will (47:01.669)

I see funding as an inherently political act.

Gaël Duez (47:07.49)

Okay, got it.

Will (47:07.726)

You have a certain amount of resources that you have to distribute and that becomes more or less a question of politics at corporate or bureaucratic level.

Gaël Duez (47:18.462)

Got it. Thanks a lot. I've got one last question for you, Holly. And I know it's me jumping from one topic to another, but it's such a rich material that you're both bringing on the table that I want to cover all angles. You mentioned several times, and I couldn't help telling me we need to discuss this a bit. The community, the impact on communities from locating data centers here and there. And we've seen several papers highlighting across the globe. I think they've been one in the UK, one in the Netherlands, quite a lot in South America as well, local pushback against data centers. And also that Jerry McGovern made a rally battle cry, I would say, fact that economic benefits that are often stated by hyperscalers when they set up a new facility somewhere are vastly overestimated. So I think it's kind of a boiling at the moment, the topic of what do we get when we are in local community and we've got such big buildings consuming so much energy and so much water in our neighborhood with the noises, et cetera.

But hey, lot of mayors and politicians, will say jobs, jobs, jobs.

Holly Alpine (48:56.438)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, lots to say here. Yeah, not too many jobs, not that many jobs in a data center. And there is definitely environmental impacts from building a new data center in a community. And what I was trying to do, I was on the data center community development team. So when I was on the energy team at Microsoft, this data center community development team had these economic and social programs where it would try to give back to those local communities in various ways having to do with social and economic benefits. The program that I started was around environmental sustainability. So this was not related to the sustainability impact of the data center itself.

There is a team at Microsoft that is trying to reduce the environmental impact of those data centers, whether that's reducing water usage or increasing energy efficiency of the servers that are being used. There's a whole team actually on biomimicry. Well, it's a small team, but they're looking at how they can actually look at ecosystems nearby the data center and try to have the data center have an actually positive impact on the environment. This is in the nascent stages and could use a lot more investment to actually become really relevant to their global portfolio. But there is that team doing some great things to decrease the footprint. What my role was, was understanding the priorities of those data center communities and how we could give back in a positive way to the environments of where those communities were located. I directed investments of over $8 million in the time that I was there across 45 different global mostly investing in urban forestry and ecological restoration projects to provide human well-being and social equity and positive environmental benefits. I’m proud of what I did and my team did. think it's absolutely something that companies should do. If they have a physical presence in a community, they should absolutely have programs to give back. What I wrestle with and what I worry about is the net impact of the work that I was doing. If the work that I did to be a good neighbor was then used to justify increasing data center expansion, there was no net impact analysis on the positive from the work that I was doing and the harms from those data center expansions. So, you know, the jury's out there on the net impact of the work, but that's the work that I was doing for about seven years.

Gaël Duez (53:19.358)

I would say it's interesting that the direct benefits are not that high that actually Microsoft or other companies needed to empower a team with a significant budget. We can discuss 8 millions regarding to the billions made in revenue from Microsoft. Sure, it sounds like very big numbers but proportionally to what we've said earlier in the discussion doesn't seem that high. But hey, I guess with 8 millions, you can achieve a lot of things.

But what is interesting is you needed these kinds of programs to offset the environmental cost. And if I rephrase you properly, eventually you didn't have a clear cut understanding on whether you had net positive impact or not when you were implementing a data center in any community. Am I correct stating that?

Holly Alpine (54:13.016)

Yeah, that's right. I mean, absolutely, that team should have way more funding. We are trying to advocate for the funding to be tied to, say, electricity usage and have some percentage of the electricity bill or the construction budget have the amount that goes back to the communities be tied to that and not just be an arbitrary number that we got allocated each year. And that's correct. We did not do an analysis of the cost benefit for the environment through these programs.

Gaël Duez (54:51.86)

Okay, thanks a lot. Still a huge achievement.

I could feel it when you say that. We were proud of what we were doing.

Holly Alpine (55:07.865)

absolutely. it wasn't just about the environmental impact too. I a lot of the programs we did, we tried to incorporate really strong principles into these projects that ensured that we had those social equity components and human wellbeing. mean, we were trying to employ local folks who were underemployed. We were trying to ensure that we had different equity components incorporated into where we were doing these projects and ensure that we were putting them in the areas that needed them most. mean, we had really solid principles in the program overall.

Gaël Duez (55:47.06)

Got it. So if I understand, if I can wrap up the first part of this podcast episode, you joined Microsoft because you believed in the brands. Both of you, you were part of a super strong grassroots movement who achieved significant results when it comes to sustainability across all countries where Microsoft is operating. You listed some significant achievements, whether it's your local community program, Holi, deploying SCI, not necessarily at scale, but at least testing it in a very serious production environment for you will. So it was pretty good time. Am I correct to say so?

Will (56:44.653)

I'd say it's been one of the best times of my career thus far, and especially seeing the impact that we've both made at such a scale has been truly rewarding. I'm grateful for the experience.

Gaël Duez (56:56.54)

Okay, so thanks a lot for sharing it.

But now I think it's time to ask the $1 million question, At some point, both of you, you decided to leave and you didn't do it that quietly. So could you tell us a bit the story here? …

Gaël Duez (58:31.486)

This is the end of the first part of this episode with Holly and Will. The second part where we will discuss why the left and the crisis around enabled emissions will be live next Tuesday, that is October the 19th. Make sure to follow the podcast or subscribe to the email notification not to miss it.

Gaël Duez (59:09.32)

Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, give us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Sharing it on social media or directly with a colleague or a relative working in the tech industry seems also good idea regarding what is at stake here. As I always say, we are an independent media relying solely on you to get more listeners.

By the way, Green IO is a podcast and much more, so visit greenio.tech, subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog and check the conferences we organize across the globe. London was a blast last month and the next one is in Paris on December the 4th and the 5th. You can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP Just make sure to have one before the 100 free tickets are all I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world,

Roxane (01:00:48.242)

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#47a - The Microsoft Azure dilemma with Holly and William Alpine - Learnings from a 10K employee grassroots sustainability initiative

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Holly and Will's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

Transcript (auto-generated)

Gaël Duez (01:53.354)

Hello Will, Hello Holly, very nice to have you on the show.

Great to finally have a recording on three different time zones. So we made it. Thanks to you and welcome to the show.

Will (07:49.437)

Thanks for having us.

Holly Alpine (07:51.366)

Thank you, glad to be here.

Gaël Duez (07:54.07)

Yeah, I'm especially happy regarding Will because Will at the moment, if I'm not wrong, you're at sea. Am I right?

Will (08:04.495)

I am currently on a Sea Shepherd ship in Tasmania. We're doing a refit to prepare the ship for an Arctic voyage. So we're not on the open ocean, but I am on a boat that is floating on the water.

Gaël Duez (08:17.344)

Okay, pretty cool. What are you doing there?

Will (08:21.459)

This is part of a campaign to refit a boat from an old fishing vessel into one that's used to fight illegal fishing. So I'm fighting poetic justice in the work that we're doing.

Gaël Duez (08:31.842)

Well, that's pretty cool. how an engineer, a software engineer or data scientist, I don't know which hat do you want to wear these days, how can you contribute to this kind of campaign?

Will (08:46.459)

Gaël Duez (09:02.294)

What is to work at Microsoft and especially in the data center division? It's huge, maybe Oli, can you share some numbers to grasp the magnitude of its operations?

Holly Alpine (09:45.382)

Gaël Duez (10:20.0)

Will (10:37.075)

Gaël Duez (11:03.667)

Will you meant 32 billions for the entire Microsoft revenue with Azure accounting? For roughly 40 % of it. Am I correct?

Will (11:24.722)

That's my understanding, yes.

Gaël Duez (11:38.807)

Will (11:56.594)

Gaël Duez (12:15.829)

in the thousands just for the US. Wow, that's pretty impressive.

Holly Alpine (12:21.497)

And a number that I saw the other day was that Microsoft is opening a new data center every three days.

Gaël Duez (12:29.651)

Holly Alpine (12:48.783)

Gaël Duez (13:17.483)

Will (14:29.244)

You know, that's my one regret from my time at Microsoft. I never managed to make a data center visit.

Gaël Duez (14:35.063)

Really?

Holly Alpine (14:36.827)

Gaël Duez (15:21.271)

Will (16:09.832)

Gaël Duez (16:54.807)

Holly Alpine (17:54.137)

Will (19:40.196)

Holly Alpine (20:27.695)

Will (20:54.706)

Same here.

Gaël Duez (20:56.225)

Holly Alpine (21:50.747)

Gaël Duez (23:37.492)

Holly Alpine (23:59.865)

Will (24:32.754)

Gaël Duez (25:52.257)

Will (25:59.653)

Awesome

Holly Alpine (26:19.481)

Gaël Duez (27:14.517)

Hmm. And that was you.

Will (27:15.59)

Gaël Duez (27:42.555)

So many roads I'd love to follow from that point, but I would like to ask two questions.

Holly Alpine (29:40.559)

Will (31:03.208)

I would say that's fair to say.

Gaël Duez (31:08.808)

Holly Alpine (33:04.123)

Will (34:24.284)

So there's a top down that needs to meet a bottoms up approach.

Gaël Duez (35:27.079)

Will (36:29.832)

Holly Alpine (36:45.202)

Gaël Duez (37:43.093)

Now that's super valuable.

Will (37:43.206)

Gaël Duez (38:54.799)

Will (39:47.624)

Gaël Duez (41:32.343)

Will (42:11.378)

Gaël Duez (42:36.469)

Were there any clients asking to get this information?

Will (42:49.724)

There were several clients that were asking, but it was always a ruthless prioritization exercise.

Gaël Duez (42:56.404)

Okay.

Will (42:57.318)

Gaël Duez (43:13.527)

Will (43:35.831)

Gaël Duez (43:52.447)

Will (44:35.368)

Gaël Duez (45:51.607)

Will (46:17.605)

Gaël Duez (46:48.87)

Okay, got it. Thanks lot for the clarification. What did you state it was becoming political? It's just a question of resource allocation or there are other topics there.

Will (47:01.669)

I see funding as an inherently political act.

Gaël Duez (47:07.49)

Okay, got it.

Will (47:07.726)

You have a certain amount of resources that you have to distribute and that becomes more or less a question of politics at corporate or bureaucratic level.

Gaël Duez (47:18.462)

But hey, lot of mayors and politicians, will say jobs, jobs, jobs.

Holly Alpine (48:56.438)

Gaël Duez (53:19.358)

Holly Alpine (54:13.016)

Gaël Duez (54:51.86)

Okay, thanks a lot. Still a huge achievement.

I could feel it when you say that. We were proud of what we were doing.

Holly Alpine (55:07.865)

Gaël Duez (55:47.06)

Will (56:44.653)

I'd say it's been one of the best times of my career thus far, and especially seeing the impact that we've both made at such a scale has been truly rewarding. I'm grateful for the experience.

Gaël Duez (56:56.54)

Okay, so thanks a lot for sharing it.

But now I think it's time to ask the $1 million question, At some point, both of you, you decided to leave and you didn't do it that quietly. So could you tell us a bit the story here? …

Gaël Duez (58:31.486)

Gaël Duez (59:09.32)

Roxane (01:00:48.242)

One byte at a time.

67 episodes

#Tech #Gaël Duez #Sustainability #Digital #Carbon Footprint #Climate Change #Low Carbon #Science #Non-Profit #Geology #Business #Green

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#47a - The Microsoft Azure dilemma with Holly and William Alpine - Learnings from a 10K employee grassroots sustainability initiative

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#47a - The Microsoft Azure dilemma with Holly and William Alpine - Learnings from a 10K employee grassroots sustainability initiative