You must have heard of data centers. Have you also heard about how they are affecting our environment? As discussed in one of my other articles, online services and AI rely on data centers that pose a threat to the environment. Over the last few years, data centers have grown significantly. These are places which house a huge number of servers or data storage spaces to store, analyze or perform computations on computer data.
With the growth of internet users and cloud-based storage, today, data centers have become an important part of our world. To put this in perspective, if all the data centers around the world vanish today, we will lose access to all the Facebook , Instagram or X (Twitter) accounts. Not just social media but essential parts of our life like online transactions or navigation could also come to a halt.
Why are these data centers a big burden? Why do they consume so much energy? Data centers host huge servers. Servers are basically electronic components placed on a board. These electronic components produce heat as they run, to either transfer data or perform computations. This is similar to your laptop or mobile phone heating up when you play games or perform heavy operations.
Different hardware has different requirements. However, generally, the temperature of a data centre should not exceed 27°C (or around 80°F). This is possible only with sufficient cooling for the data centers. The power consumption of any data center varies depending on the scale of the facility and the efficiency of the installed equipment. Small data centers that span from 5000–20,000 sq.ft, with 500–2,000 servers, usually consume 1–5 MW of power. Large or hyper-scale data centers that span from a large area of 100,000 sq.ft to several million sq.ft, accommodating tens of thousands of servers, consume 20 MW to over 100 MW of power. These huge cooling capacities need huge amounts of electricity in addition to the energy needed for other operations of the data centers.
From a technological perspective, data centers are great. But from the standpoint of energy, data centers are just bad news. Google says it spends about 0.0003 kWh of energy on an average search query. According to them, on average, one person makes 3–4 Google searches on a daily basis. This excludes other online activities such as shopping or messaging. I can assure you I made much more than 3–4 searches just to write this article. Can you imagine the energy needed just for searches of all the 68% of the world population who have access to the internet?
It is expected that data centers will continue to grow with an expected increase of 165% in energy demand only from the use of AI.
The other usages of data centers might even call for more energy consumption. Already, global data centers account for more energy than small countries such as the Netherlands or New Zealand. With electrification for energy transition, grids are becoming more vulnerable to congestion. In fact the problem of grid congestion is already huge in developed countries like the Netherlands.
You not only need extra energy capacity for these data centres, but you also want to make them sustainable and power them with renewable energy. However, renewables are not always reliable and require a backup. If the power supply stops, it could lead to a loss of data. A lot of companies are now looking for a solution to power their data centers. In fact Microsoft has recently moved to using nuclear energy to power their AI centers. A lot of different solutions, like hydrogen-based fuel cells or nuclear-powered small modular reactors, are being developed worldwide.
The role of big corporations and governments is undeniable. However, along with this, our role as individuals is also important. We are impressed by all that AI and the internet can give us. We do not stop to consider its effect on the environment. Perhaps because the link is not as straightforward and we do not see enough information brought to us. Shifting from paper to the cloud seems like an obvious and convenient choice. Nevertheless, it is so convenient that we keep adding to our treasure of data. We need to be more aware of our digital imprint on the environment and to ensure that we do not generate unnecessary data. The first step is to be aware of the problem.
We hope we encouraged you to think of the impact data and data centers have on our environment. Help us to expand our knowledge and be more aware. If you know of any interesting articles on the topic, leave them in the comments for us.
Written in collaboration with Agney Bhakre (@simplysustainenabling).
Loved the read!