Many of the conversations around data center sustainability seem to inevitably boil down to the usual suspects: servers, cooling and power. Yes, these are important areas, and great strides have been made in optimizing those aspects of data center architecture.
But there’s a less obvious contributor to sustainability that’s often overlooked – fiber infrastructure – and when thoughtfully designed, operators can anticipate future needs, extend product lifecycles and reduce waste. As AI and other high-performance computing applications fuel unprecedented demand for data centers, fiber infrastructure can play a critical role in advancing sustainability.
Understanding the Scope of the Challenge
Google’s 10th annual Environmental Report underscores challenges the data center industry faces amid the AI boom. Its emissions swelled by 51% from 2019 to 2024 and grew 11% last year alone, despite prioritizing sustainable practices and pledging to achieve net zero emissions by 2030.
Data centers have historically focused on reducing Scope 1 and 2 emissions, reducing their direct emissions and emissions from purchased energy. But Scope 3, which includes indirect emissions from the company’s full value chain, represents the largest amount of greenhouse gas emissions for data center operators. In Google’s case, Scope 3 emissions make up 73% of its carbon footprint.
One of the intriguing aspects of fiber infrastructure from a sustainability perspective is that, if designed thoughtfully, it can be used to tackle both Scope 1 and Scope 3 emissions, through reduction in power and cooling use, and in reducing waste and required components.
Fiber for the Future
Thoughtfully designed fiber infrastructure solutions should be able to accommodate future generations of equipment, eliminating the need to replace the system as equipment ages out every five years or so. The trick is staying within the optical loss budget (the amount of light that can be lost in a cable). With bandwidth constantly growing, the optical loss budget drops correspondingly.
For example, optical loss budgets have consistently decreased as speeds have increased from 10 gigabits to 40 gigabits, then 100 gigabits, 200 gigabits, and 400 gigabits. Projecting this trend further out, as the industry moves toward 1.6 terabits per second, the amount of light that can be lost from transmitter to receiver will only continue to decline.
Over the years, manufacturers have made great strides in perfecting the performance of the cable itself. Today, one of the key culprits of optical loss is the traditional cassette-based fiber connectivity solution most data centers employ. Having multiple connection points in the cassette and at its interfaces leads to cumulative signal degradation. Each additional connection, along with internal fiber paths, introduces a small loss, reducing optical headroom. The answer? Reducing the need for additional connections with Alignment Independent Multifiber (AIM) cabling solutions.
AIM cabling enables a direct connection between connectors and two-fiber duplex MDC patch cords via a conversion adapter panel, delivering near-lossless performance, maximizing optical headroom and significantly improving density. The minuscule optical loss is thanks to AIM cabling’s ability to minimize or even eliminate the need for splicing.
By significantly minimizing signal degradation and reducing the space plastic cassettes take up, this shift provides critical enhancements in performance, efficiency and density, forging a durable physical layer that can sustain the intensive, next-generation workloads of AI and high-performance computing – much more sustainably.
Use Less, Waste Less
Beyond optical loss, direct mating breakout connections have an immediate impact on waste because they eliminate the cassette. This translates to a direct reduction in plastic waste. In a trunk and cassette-based system, there is significant plastic involved in the cassettes themselves and additional connectors. With a direct mating breakout connection, the large plastic cassette is replaced by a much smaller adapter plate, using a fraction of the plastic.
Direct mating breakout connections can be further enhanced with extended distance solutions, which, in some cases, can reduce the need for additional signal-amplifying equipment, further decreasing Scope 3 emissions by eliminating the need for this equipment.
Very Small Form Factor (VSFF) transceivers can also support sustainability in terms of space and power consumption. If more fiber can be fitted into a smaller space (e.g., 192 fibers in a rack unit instead of 96), fewer racks are needed, reducing the data center’s physical footprint. More importantly, VSFF transceivers have the potential to reduce the number of chassis required. For example, a chassis that can support 40 gigabit QSFP transceivers at 10 gigabits per lane can be broken out with VSFF connectors.
This one transceiver can take the place of four 10 gigabit SFP transceivers, reducing the number of chassis needed. If each chassis has a certain power draw, reducing the number of chassis leads to a reduction in overall power consumption. Less power consumed means fewer BTUs generated, which in turn reduces cooling requirements.
Look Past the Obvious
The “usual suspects” are usual for a reason. Power and cooling are critical in making up ground in the race toward a more sustainable future in the data center industry. But it’s crucial to look beyond the obvious for further emissions reductions, particularly as AI and HPC applications drive unprecedented demand. Fiber infrastructure, when thoughtfully designed and implemented, presents a significant – and perhaps unexpected – opportunity.