April 23: Hitachi Vantara, the data storage, infrastructure and hybrid cloud management subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd. (TSE: 6501), today announced the release of its FY2025 Sustainability Report, detailing measurable advancements across its environmental, social and governance priorities. The report highlights advancements in energy-efficient infrastructure, including innovations across Hitachi Vantara’s Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One) data platform, expanded lifecycle sustainability initiatives and strengthened governance practices to support customers navigating the growing demands of AI and data-intensive workloads.
As organizations accelerate digital transformation and AI adoption, the energy and efficiency demands of data infrastructure are rising sharply, creating new operational and sustainability challenges. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global data center electricity consumption could reach more than 1,000 terawatt-hours by 2026, roughly equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of a major industrialized nation, driven in part by AI workloads. At the same time, organizations are under pressure to reduce costs, making it more difficult to balance performance with environmental impact. As electricity demand increases, so do the power and cooling requirements needed to support data infrastructure, making efficiency a critical factor in both cost and sustainability. Hitachi Vantara is addressing this challenge by embedding sustainability into its infrastructure, helping customers reduce energy consumption, optimize operations and improve return on investment.
“Sustainability is increasingly tied to operational performance and business outcomes,” said Akinobu Shimada, CEO of Hitachi Vantara. “In FY2025, we focused on helping customers manage the growth of AI and data while improving efficiency and reducing environmental impact. Our investments in infrastructure innovation, lifecycle design and governance are enabling customers to achieve powerful results.”
Key highlights from the report include:
- Infrastructure efficiency and performance: Hitachi Vantara introduced VSP One Block High End, designed to deliver scalable infrastructure that improves efficiency while maintaining high reliability and reducing power and cooling requirements for enterprise and AI-driven workloads, supported by integrated tools for energy monitoring, carbon reduction and sustainability reporting.
- Lifecycle sustainability advancements: The company expanded lifecycle assessment initiatives across its VSP One Block, File and Object portfolios, enabling more accurate measurement of environmental impact and improved Scope 3 emissions visibility. These efforts are complemented by tools such as the Clear Sight dashboard, which provides customers with visibility into energy consumption and carbon usage, along with actionable insights to optimize system efficiency and environmental impact.
- Circularity and materials sustainability: Hitachi Vantara increased the use of post-consumer recycled plastics across its storage systems, with up to 50% recycled content in key components. The company also reported that less than 0.3% of materials were sent to landfill, with the vast majority reused or recycled through optimized recovery and circularity programs.
- Governance and data quality improvements: Hitachi Vantara enhanced cross-functional governance and emissions tracking processes, strengthening audit readiness and improving data accuracy across Scope 1, Scope 2 and key Scope 3 categories, aligning with science-based emissions reduction targets and evolving ESG reporting standards.
Hitachi Vantara’s commitment to sustainability extends beyond its own operations, focusing on helping customers achieve measurable improvements in efficiency, performance and environmental impact. Through its infrastructure and data platforms, the company enables organizations to reduce energy consumption, optimize resource utilization and support more sustainable operations at scale. Recent examples include:
- Aquiris (Belgium): Upgraded its storage platform with VSP One Block to improve operational efficiency, resilience and reliability for critical water treatment operations, processing more than 110 million cubic meters of wastewater annually and collecting over one million data points per day, while helping reduce power usage and lower its carbon footprint through more efficient data management and infrastructure.
- DestekBank (Turkey): Deployed VSP One Block to support rapid retail banking expansion, achieving a 25% reduction in data center energy consumption, a 35% increase in application performance and a 20% reduction in total cost of ownership.
- Malayala Manorama (India): Modernized its data infrastructure with Hitachi Vantara to support 24/7 media operations, achieving a 66% reduction in data center rack space and 70% savings in power and cooling costs, while improving availability and operational efficiency across its print, broadcast and digital platforms.
“Hitachi Vantara is helping us fulfill our goal of creating a sustainable process for safeguarding supplies of clean water and supporting the growth and development of Brussels,” said Juan Ochoa, managing plant director, Aquiris. “The performance gains with VSP One Block will be significant. We are constantly collecting data, tracking KPIs and monitoring our purification processes. The improvement in storage capabilities will help us respond quickly to issues and optimize our plant operations.”
While the FY2025 Sustainability Report reflects progress across the past year, it also reflects a broader shift in how Hitachi Vantara is approaching sustainability, embedding efficiency, transparency and lifecycle thinking directly into its infrastructure and operations. This approach helps organizations operationalize sustainability at scale, particularly as AI-driven workloads continue to increase infrastructure demands.
