Data centres powering artificial intelligence could use more electricity than entire cities

The power needs of artificial intelligence and cloud computing are growing so large that individual data centre campuses could soon use more electricity than some cities, and even entire US states, according to companies developing the facilities. The electricity consumption of data centres has exploded along with their increasingly critical role in the economy in the past 10 years, housing servers that power the applications businesses and consumers rely on for daily tasks. Now, with the advent of artificial intelligence, data centres are growing so large that finding enough power to drive them and enough suitable land to house them will become increasingly difficult, the developers say. The facilities could increasingly demand a gigawatt or more of power — one billion watts — or about twice the residential electricity consumption of the US city Pittsburgh area last year. While data centres are more widespread in the US compared to Australia, the industry is growing rapidly down under — evidenced by the ascent of ASX-listed NextDC to become a $10 billion company. Technology companies are in a “race of a lifetime to global dominance” in artificial intelligence, said Ali Fenn, president of Lancium, a company that secures land and power for data centres in Texas. “It’s frankly about national security and economic security,” she said. “They’re going to keep spending” because there’s no more profitable place to deploy capital. Renewable energy alone won’t be sufficient to meet their power needs. Natural gas will have to play a role, developers say, which will slow progress toward meeting carbon dioxide emissions targets. One data centre operating at 85 per cent capacity over the course of a year will consume nearly as much energy as 710,000 US. households or 1.8 million people. A data centre campus that size would use more power in one year than retail electric sales in Alaska, Rhode Island or Vermont, according to US Department of Energy data. A gigawatt-size data centre campus running at even the lower end of peak demand is still roughly comparable to about 330,000 households, or a city of more than 800,000 people — about the population of San Francisco. The average size of individual data centres operated by the major tech companies is currently around 40 megawatts, but a growing pipeline of campuses of 250 megawatts or more is coming, according to data from the Boston Consulting Group.