Two companies are collaborating to help data centres in Singapore measure their carbon footprint and improve their operational efficiencies towards greater sustainability. The partnership is touted to include services, powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, to track and forecast greenhouse gas emissions of critical data centre systems.

The partnership between MetaVerse Green Exchange (MVGX) and Red Dot Analytics (RDA) would aim to "verifiably measure and offset" the carbon footprint of data centres in tropical environments, the two companies said in a joint statement Wednesday. 

A deep-tech startup spun off from Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, RDA offers AI-enabled applications to help operators of mission-critical infrastructures such as buildings, utility grids, and manufacturing plants improve their energy efficiencies and productivity. Its flagship offering taps machine learning and digital twin models to draw data insights that are touted to help data centre operators slash energy costs by up to 40%, by tweaking their existing hardware systems.

RDA's digital twin technology creates a virtual replica of physical systems and analyses large data volumes to simulate the effect of changes made to a system before these modifications are deployed. 

Under the partnership, MVGX would tag RDA as one of its preferred data center providers and encourage its customers to work with RDA to increase the sustainability of their data center operations. RDA also would market MVGX as its preferred platform for the financing of green data centres.

Based in Singapore, MVGX was founded in 2018 to offer a digital exchange platform for crypto assets and carbon trading. Its Non-Fungible Digital Twin technology is used to "represent" objects in the metaverse while its Carbon Neutrality Token, powered by blockchain technology, facilitates cross-border trading of carbon voluntary emission reduction credits. 

These technologies were integrated with MVGX's carbon management system offering, which RDA clients could tap to calculate their carbon footprint as well as validate and verify through the British Standards Institution, to obtain the ISO 14064 international standard. They then could offset the carbon emissions with MVGX's Carbon Neutrality Token to achieve PAS 2060 Carbon Neutrality Standard. 

RDA's chief scientist Wen Yonggang said: "While there are growing trends in the use of renewables or the race to produce more energy-efficient hardware, the truth is, we need to find ways to use energy in a more intelligent way and that begins with accurate measurement."

MVGX's executive chairman and co-founder Bo Bai added that, in targeting net-zero goals, organisations should look at the "entire scope" of how they functioned, including the infrastructure that powered their operations. 

Noting that data centres today were a core component of any digital organisation, Bai said: "In working with RDA, we want to show that there is a way to ensure that energy expenditure, at every level, can be accounted for and mitigated accurately."

In a video call with ZDNet, Bai said there always were residual emissions in a data centre's carbon footprint. The partnership with RDA aimed to help data centres offset these emissions and work towards carbon neutrality, he said. He added that doing so also required data transparency and integrity, which the collaboration hoped to offer through greater trust in the carbon neutral certification process.

Bai said the collaboration currently supported only data centre operators in Singapore, though, the two partners hoped to expand their services to other Asean markets in the future.

MVGX last month inked an agreement with OCBC Bank to develop green financing services, including tokenised carbon credits--based on the company's Carbon Neutrality Token technology--for large enterprises to offset their carbon emissions.

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