Inside Dell’s Data Centre Sustainability Strategy

As Director, Data Center Sustainability, Alyson Freeman leads the sustainability and ESG innovation efforts for Dell Technologies, driving the creation of environmentally responsible products and business strategies with a focus on AI and data centre energy use. 

She has 20 years’ experience in engineering and management roles at NASA, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Samsung, Intel and Dell Technologies. Her Ph.D. is in materials engineering with a focus on semiconductors and she holds multiple patents in the field of AI and energy management.

Alyson is global lead for the Women in Technology employee resource group at Dell Technologies, a Co-Founder and former Chair of Women in Technology at Samsung Austin Semiconductor, a board member of the National Girls Collaborative Project and a board member of Westwood STEM Academy. She also co-founded a global Coding for Kids programme at Dell. 

She is the recipient of the Texas Stand Up for STEM Mentoring Award, featured in STEM Crew Magazine for her engineering career and named a Changemaker in Sustainability and ESG by Austin Woman Magazine.

At Sustainability LIVE: The US Summit 2026, Alyson explored data centre sustainability at Dell.

AI is being used to optimise at Dell – how are you using that technology to boost your sustainability mission?

It's boosting our full mission, which in turn helps sustainability. 

I think about it from both hardware and software perspectives.

We're able to test our hardware through AI simulations and make these development cycles so much faster, but there's also a small sustainability benefit there where you're not having to create the prototype, test it.

Those products would go to waste otherwise and so you can do it virtually and you can move a lot faster. 

We're also seeing a lot of benefits within the sustainability team when our software teams are using AI for their development.

They can go so much faster than ever before. I used to have to fight to get on priority lists for different product features and justify what our customers are asking for related to sustainability. And then of course the software teams need to fold that into the rest of their priorities and how they want to do things.

But now, their capacity is so much more I'm finding I have to fight less and they can do so much more – and they can get excited!

There's a few that really want to work on sustainability and this is enabling them to spend their time in the areas that they're most passionate about.

How is Dell leading the way in the more unseen areas such as cooling, power distribution and server racks?

I've been talking about sustainability and data centres forever, but I feel like the whole world has caught up. They're interested in this topic as well. 

Dell focuses on how to make sure data centres can run as efficiently as possible. Hardware-wise, a lot of what uses most of the energy inside a data centre is for cooling.

Just like if you have a laptop when you tell it to do too many things, you think too hard, it gets kind of hot on your lap.

Servers also get very hot and we have to either use fans or liquid cooling or even sometimes more advanced immersion cooling, which is where you dunk the server into a mineral oil tank to help remove the heat. Just all different ways to remove the heat. 

In terms of software too, you'd be surprised how much software can help within a data centre.

There's lots of servers that are sometimes running extra things that they don't need to be or they don't realise are still running.

Creating those software solutions to make sure we're not wasting any energy is going to help us use the power that we have today more efficiently instead of needing to add more power to the grid.

What is your one piece of advice for someone who's just starting on their sustainability journey in a similar field to you? 

Follow the data. The first step is to try to figure out where your environmental impacts are.

Measuring that is hard enough, but there's tonnes of third party raters, rankers and tools that can help you figure this out. 

Just by going through that process, the data will lead you to what you need to work on first and help you prioritise because there's so much that you can do in so many different areas – so just let the data lead you.