Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Facebook, and Microsoft are making hundreds of data center patents open & available for free to accelerate the adoption of low-carbon technologies.
As part of the HPE-led Low-Carbon Patent Pledge, the companies are offering royalty‐free licenses on a number of patents when used for ‘the generation, storage, or distribution of low‐carbon energy from solar, wind, ocean, hydropower, or geothermal sources.’
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Royalty-free patents for carbon change
“The world needs radical collaboration to meet this critical moment in the climate crisis,” said John Frey, chief technologist for sustainable transformation at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “To achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, we need to work together to innovate faster. By opening up these patents, we hope to help accelerate and encourage innovation by enabling others to build upon our work.”
The patent list includes power and capacity management, immersion cooling enclosures and other cooling concepts, and data center architecture, as well as Microsoft’s patents for a submerged data center. The companies hope to ‘accelerate adoption of low-carbon technologies, foster collaborative innovation, and facilitate sustainable breakthroughs.’
“History has shown that voluntary pledges of patents can help to promote new technologies and encourage their adoption around the world,” said intellectual property law expert Jorge L. Contreras, Presidential Scholar and Professor of Law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah. “This is precisely the kind of initiative that's needed to combat the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change.”
