AMD: a newly built campus with a host of green features

By Dan Ilett
Published: September 17 2008 03:00

Old buildings have problems when it comes to technology and helping the environment - after all they were hardly built with the modern day in mind - but newer buildings should cater for both factors.
When chip maker AMD started to build a new campus three years ago in Austin, Texas, it set itself the ambitious target of giving the building the "wow factor" while keeping the environmental impact to a minimum.
"The campus was designed to fit the needs of its employees and the local environment," says Craig Garcia, director of corporate services and project manager for Lone Star, as the campus is called.
"[We] assembled a diverse team of internationally recognised architects, engineers, ecologists and sustainable design experts.
"The team embarked on an intensive design process known as a 'charrette' and created a site plan based on three key tenets - limiting site impact, protecting water quality and using innovative sustainable design."
Some $270m later and AMD has signed a 10-year contract with Austin Energy for 100 per cent renewable power for Lone Star.
You might be forgiven for thinking that an IT company would want to use as much IT as possible to control such a building - perhaps simply because it has become expected that technology firms will have the latest versions of everything.
But AMD appears to have taken sustainable design to heart, using recycled materials, local manufacturing and wood grown in ecologically maintained forests.
"Most of the design features integrated into the building were one-time investments, such as bamboo floors or concrete walls, and do not require monitoring and maintenance from IT or any other operations team," says Mr Garcia.
"Green teams help educate employees about integrating environmentally friendly choices into their everyday actions and source new ideas for how employees can minimise their footprints."
But he adds that AMD also uses the latest technology in its products to help the environment: "Besides constantly improving facility operations, AMD designs energy efficiency features into products that result in lower emissions from the generation of electricity consumed during the product's useful life.
"Most recently, we introduced advanced quad-core technology, for energy-hungry data centres. Designed to beat pre-existing benchmarks, it boosts performance of AMD processors up to 70 per cent without any increase in energy-consumption."
Impressive campus features include a 1.1m gallon underground water tank that siphons rainwater from the roof. This is stored and is, in turn, used to irrigate the site's enormous landscape and to cool the building.
Another spokesman adds: "We don't have what you'd call a data centre. We have a cold room for servers that run business operations. But we have data centres offsite.
"There are a number of things in the design of the building that save energy though. The windows are designed to let more daylight in so we don't need as much lighting.
"We have a cooling system that uses less electricity, but the trade-off is that it uses more water. That's why we've got the 1.1m gallon water tank to collect the rain."
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008