Inside Lenovo’s Budapest factory: making workstations more sustainable

Lenovo has just pressed a huge, green and metaphorical button in Budapest. Thanks to 5,072 solar panels sitting atop two huge factories, its research facility can now be entirely powered by renewable energy.

To mark the occasion, Lenovo invited me and 14 other European journalists to visit the facility. Here’s my behind-the-scenes tour, including some photos of the rooftop taken at no small risk. Those steps were slippery…

Lenovo’s Budapest factory by numbers

• 5,072: the number of solar panels
• 3 megawatts: total solar energy capacity
• 10,800 miles: how far an electric car could drive on 3 megawatts
• 17 megawatts: Lenovo’s solar capacity worldwide
• 49,000 square metres: total warehouse space in Budapest
• 600,000 to 800,000: number of products Lenovo ships each year from Budapest
• 1.5+ million: number of products it has shipped since the factory was built in 2022
• 2,500 customers in 70 countries: where the factory has shipped to

Going green in Budapest

Sadly, a roof-full of solar panels isn’t enough to keep the whole factory running. Instead, Lenovo has calculated that the 3 megawatts can power its HPC and AI Innovation Center.

“[The HPC and AI Innovation Center] is a proof of concept and benchmark for development teams of our clients,” said Szabolcs Zolyomi, Global Supply Chain Factory Site Leader at Lenovo. “They and our Lenovo developers meet virtually on real hardware and test solutions before they spend money to buy one.”

He added: “We are very happy that from today on, this Innovation Center is powered 100% by solar technology. And then the waste heat that it generates is recirculated to heat our conference centre.”

Zolyomi was keen to point out that the building was always built with sustainability in mind, sucking in outside air during colder months to keep the factory cool. And it also uses the heat generated by the servers to warm water that’s pumped into radiators.

And rather than him alone seeing the impact of energy usage within the factory, Lenovo has placed a set of screens near where the employees exit the floor. He calls it the ESG board.

“We built the ESG board basically because we want to create culture in the plant,” said Zolyomi. “Typically… there’s a queue of people trying to make it through the magnetic gates so people have time to stop by and read a little bit. So we are trying to show them real-time electricity consumption, real-time water consumption data.”

Photos from the factory floor

I took over 100 photos during our tour of the floor, so be grateful that this is merely a small selection. The key thing to note: it’s big. And while it’s spaced out and highly automated, to build each workstation, each server, requires the meticulous attention of dozens of employees.

Once a product has been built, samples are checked for quality. Every product is put through a series of soak tests behind the above doors, as shown in the photos below.

These are ThinkCentre workstations, but the same is true for rack servers and water-cooled systems. But before they’re shipped out, Lenovo’s most elite engineers perform random checks in a separate area – and have the power to stop shipments of huge batches if they don’t like what they see.

And here’s one of my favourite bits of the whole tour: where a hefty rack server is put in a box. Honestly, watch it. It’s hypnotic.

How to spot if a box has been mishandled

So the boxes have left the building, being whisked away to pretty much anywhere in Europe and the Middle East. How, you are of course asking, can a customer be sure that a product has been handled sensibly? The answer lies in the hands of this extremely nice Lenovo employee who kindly posed with them for me.

I’m particularly fond of the TiltWatch Plus add-on, as it will tell recipients exactly how much a box has been tilted during shipping. If it goes above a certain amount, marked on the package as shown below, then they should refuse it.

The next challenge for Lenovo is to persuade the TiltWatch Plus makers to use biodegradable plastic. When I hunted out the specs, it’s listed as being made from PVC plastics and glass.

Up on the Lenovo Budapest factory roof

After we’d finished the tour, Lenovo invited us up to the roof. I don’t love heights, I don’t love spiral staircases (have these people never watched Vertigo?) and I’m even less fond of them in the pouring rain. But still, it was worth it.

The keen-eyed will notice that not all of the panels have yet been plugged in, but Zolyomi assured me that this was a gradual process.

The final photo in that gallery is of the second Lenovo factory, which is smaller (14,000 square metres rather than 35,000 square metres). This is where it has its “Value Recovery Services”, home to refurbished workstations that are checked, repaired and upgraded so they can have a second life.

While this is all positive, Lenovo is keenly aware that it’s at the start of its journey to being a Net Zero company. “We want to be Net Zero by 2050,” said Stefan Brechling Larsen, Global Sustainability Services Engagement Leader at Lenovo. “Yes, we know 2050 is far away, but we also have near-term targets by 2030… we keep innovating, we keep pushing.”

Brechling added that Lenovo also holds itself to account by using third-party auditors Science Based Targets. “One of the elements that’s also important to emphasise in this is that we also work with sub-suppliers, and here we actually work together with EcoVadis around the whole ESG part of validating partners as well.”

Worth a read

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