Industrial Chillers from Yotta Data Services Pvt. Data Center in Navi Mumbai, India, Thursday, March 14, 2024.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The massive growth in the number of data centers around the world shows no signs of slowing down, prompting big tech companies to consider how best to drive the artificial intelligence revolution.
Some options on the table include moving to core, data center liquid cooling and quantum computing.
However, critics say that as the pace of improvements in electricity efficiency slows, tech giants should recognize the cost of generating electricity AI Prosperity across the supply chain—and abandon the “move fast and break things” narrative.
“At the moment, the real environmental costs are quite hidden. The fact that tech companies need access to products and support simply subsidizes the environmental costs,” said Somya Joshi, head of Global Agenda, Climate and Systems at the Stockholm Environmental Institute (SEI). told CNBC via video call.
A wave of data center investment is underway expected According to the International Energy Agency, this will accelerate further in the coming years, driven primarily by growing digitalization and the adoption of generative artificial intelligence.
It’s this prospect that raises concerns about surging power demand and the often-overlooked but crucial environmental impact of artificial intelligence.
Data centers consume increasing amounts of energy and are the critical infrastructure behind modern cloud computing and artificial intelligence applications.
Giampiero Frisio, president of the electrification business of Swiss multinational ABB, said that the engineering group’s data center business has achieved significant growth in recent years and is expected to grow by more than 24% by 2024.
Frisio said ABB is well-positioned amid the boom in demand for artificial intelligence to supply mid-sized and established industry players with all the components needed to run data centers.
“I think the best way to take action now is to improve energy efficiency. This is the best way because the technology already exists, such as the medium voltage HiPerGuard UPS. You can do it and you can do it tomorrow morning,” Frisio told CNBC via video call.
HiPerGuard UPS is ABB’s industry’s first medium-voltage uninterruptible power supply, which is said to provide continuous power for large facilities.
Server room in Indian data center.
Dheeraj Singh | Bloomberg | Getty Images
“The second one is moving to liquid cooling, there’s no doubt about it. Again, it’s for energy efficiency. Why? Because there’s just one rack, you know those black boxes that look like a closet that have all the servos in it Internally, their power density will be four to six times higher than before,” Frisio said.
“After that, we’re talking about five to 10 years from now, which is a core modular system,” he added.
Big tech companies are going nuclear
The surge in demand for generative AI coincides with efforts to find more efficient cooling solutions in data centers, specifically liquid cooling — a process that uses water to lower the temperature of servers and other electronic equipment.
I think that in the summer of every great technology we discover there is a winter – but don’t pay attention to it until winter comes.
Raj Hazra
CEO of Quantum Corporation
French power equipment manufacturer Schneider Electric recently completed a $850 million deal Acquired a controlling stake in Motivair Corp, a US company specializing in liquid cooling for high-performance computing.
Schneider Electric CEO Peter Herweck told CNBC last month that the all-cash deal, designed to bolster its service offering to data centers, was “significant but not overly expensive” and a “very good fit” with the company’s strategy .
In addition to nuclear power and liquid cooling technology, some technology companies have said that developments in artificial intelligence may help decarbonize data centers.
For example, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt explain Last month, investing in artificial intelligence could be the key to solving some of our biggest environmental challenges as “we won’t hit our climate goals no matter what.”
SEI’s Joshi flatly rejects this notion.
“These arguments are not new, they are very much in line with the ‘silver bullet’, ‘technology will save us’ narrative,” Joshi said.
“It is inherently contradictory to say that we operate within certain limits. planetary boundaries However, by transcending them and continuing with the same extraction narrative, we will somehow solve the problems we face now,” she added.
Quantum computing
Raj Hazra, CEO of Quantinuum, the world’s largest integrated quantum computing company, told CNBC via video call: “I think every great technology we discover has a summer and a winter, but Don’t pay attention to it until winter arrives.
“That’s how I would describe what’s happening to generate artificial intelligence, the infrastructure needed to support it (and) the massive data centers that have to be built.”
Hazra said optimism about the generative AI boom has strained the costs of running the technology.
Aerial view of the data center of the American multinational technology company Google in San Diego on October 9, 2024. , to support projects with low water consumption.
Rodrigo Arangua | Rodrigo Arangua AFP | Getty Images
“Although artificial intelligence is wonderful, it faces two challenges. One is whether it is sustainable from a resource perspective? Second, is it responsible?” Hazra said. “I bring up this context because quantum is crucial to both of them.”
Quantum computing refers to the field of computer science that uses the laws of quantum mechanics to solve extremely complex problems.
Hazra said a “who’s who” of corporate and strategic investors have recently expressed interest in Quantinuum, which raised approx. US$300 million in its latest round of equity financing. Honeywell is the company’s majority shareholder, explain The financing brings Quantinuum’s valuation to $5 billion.
“One of the things that has become very obvious is that it’s no longer appropriate to say I have a solution to a problem; you have to say I have a sustainable solution,” Hazra said.
The CEO said one of quantum’s greatest contributions to society is making artificial intelligence both sustainable and responsible.
“I predict that in the next three to five years you will see people asking, what is the computing infrastructure I use to run my business? It will be a combination of high-performance computing, artificial intelligence and quantum,” he added.
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