Part 4 — Using Artificial Intelligence to Help Create a More Ecological Economy incentives. This move should, however, be coordinated with the present and future efforts of the European Commission on this subject. 4 It is important to speed up the process of ecological transition in public services by encouraging them to use ecological cloud providers, and by relying on a label created in accordance with Article 10 of decree no. 2016-360 of 25 March 2016 relating to public procurement. The use of European cloud providers needs to be supported since larger computing and storage spaces provide better energy efficiency than multiple smaller data centers5. Encouraging the recycling of heat produced by data centers We need to start planning for the recycling of heat produced by data centers, the new value chains that correspond to this and the investment needed to implement them. The State could assist local authorities in addressing these issues. Although at the present time, the amount of energy obtained is still limited, this is expected to increase. Several initiatives already exist in this field; they need to be encouraged and supported. Some examples of recycling the heat produced The Natixis bank’s data center in Marne-La-Vallée supplies water at 55 °C to heating systems in an area undergoing urban development and to the local Val d’Europe water sports center. The Stimergie company has developed a system which allows the recovery of 1 MWh of heat per server per year, which represents 60% of the heat generated, i.e. the servers’ energy consumption is reduced by more than half. The company has signed several contracts to install this system elsewhere in France, including at a block of 40 flats in Nantes and at the swimming pool at La Butte aux Cailles in the 13th arrondissement (metropolitan district) in Paris. Tapping into open hardware and open software The Open Compute project has shown that the open hardware approach can make significant energy savings possible. Facebook announced that it has saved $2bn in infrastructure costs in 3 years thanks to this project, and that it has gained 38% in energy efficiency and saved up to 24% in operating costs. 4. Following the public consultation on this subject, which was led by the Commission in October 2017, initiatives should be implemented shortly. 5. See the Direction générale des entreprises (General Directorate for Enterprise) Guide to cloud computing and data centers 107