As the industry rapidly scales to accommodate the demands of emerging technology, data centers require not only more capacity, but also more power. This need for large amounts of reliable energy has knock-on effects on cost, efficiency, and the environment—which can be complicated to manage when there are so many stakeholders and moving parts involved. Cisha Adams shares how collaborations with local power and utility companies are crucial not only to the success of data center builds and operations, but also to the future of both technological advancements and sustainability initiatives.
The modern data center has come a long way in the past few decades, but one key aspect has remained the same: the need for constant access to large amounts of power. The US has over 5,000 data centers accounting for approximately 2 percent of the country’s total electricity use, which underscores the massive and mission-critical role that power and utilities companies play in the industry.
Utility companies are already under pressure to generate more power to fuel our modern digital lives—and to do so in a renewable manner. The effort to modernize our nation’s aging electrical grids has received billions in federal investment over the past few years, but despite the ongoing upgrade efforts, a steep challenge remains. According to the US Department of Energy, transmission needs to expand by two thirds or more by 2035 in order to meet renewable energy goals. On a global level, the costs to increase our world’s power grids in order to meet these demands is projected to be 600 billion USD per year.
The Demands of Density
As the “AI boom” continues to gain momentum at its current breakneck pace, the relationship between data centers and utility providers will only become more important. We’re at the very beginning of rapid and unprecedented development in the field of AI, which will have monumental impacts on the data center industry. The companies at the heart of this boom are the world’s largest cloud and Internet companies—also known as hyperscalers—who already require large amounts of capacity, density, and therefore, power. However, the demands that AI is putting on our industry are unlike anything we’ve seen before.
AI pushes data centers to be larger and denser, as graphics processing units (GPUs) require over three-and-a-half times the power of standard central processing units (CPUs). AI also requires total power allocations sooner to utilize GPU clusters fully (as opposed to cloud-based data centers, which historically would hit full power demand over a few years).
This increased demand for capacity, density, and power has changed the way modern data centers are designed and built. Because the required power draw is so significant (10 to 50 times the energy per floor space of a typical commercial office building), most data center builds require new electrical infrastructure, such as substations and distribution / transmission lines.
