AI IN SUSTAINABILITY
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.
“ I’ ve been talking about sustainability and data centres forever, but I feel like the whole world has caught up”
Alyson Freeman Director, Data Center Sustainability 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.
Q. 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.
118 June 2026