Hyperscale Data Centers May Fundamentally Alter Global Power Demand
The ever increasing number of data centers and an accelerated adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) may cause subtle shifts in global energy systems as we enter the latter half of the current decade.
Before the mass proliferation of AI tools, computational needs of end users were largely serviced by data centers with power demand in region of 5MW per center. However, all that is rapidly changing with more and more ‘hyperscale’ or large data centers becoming commonplace.
These have typical power demands of over 100MW or more, with an annual electricity consumption equivalent to the demand from around 350,000 to 400,000 electric cars, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
That’s because a single ChatGPT query requires 2.9Wh of electricity, compared with 0.3Wh for a routine Google search; nearly 10 times as much.
It is why many forecasters believe the world will see a significant scaling up of hyperscale data centers driven by the use of AI for everyday computing. For instance, Goldman Sachs estimates the overall increase in data center power consumption from AI to be in the region of 200TWh per year between 2023 and 2030.
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Hyperscale Data Centers May Fundamentally Alter Global Power Demand, source
