Sunday, July 28, 2024, Amazon Web Services data center in Ashburn, Virginia, USA.
Nathan Howard | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The power demands of artificial intelligence and cloud computing are growing so much that a single data center campus will soon use more electricity than some cities and even entire U.S. states, according to the companies developing the facilities.
Over the past decade, data center power consumption has exploded as they play an increasingly important role in the economy, housing servers that power the applications that businesses and consumers rely on for their daily tasks.
Now, with the advent of artificial intelligence, data centers are getting so big that finding enough power to power them and enough suitable land to house them will become increasingly difficult, developers say. These facilities are likely to require increasing amounts of power, reaching gigawatts or more — billions of watts — or about twice as much as existing facilities. Pittsburgh residents’ electricity consumption area last year.
Tech companies are in a “lifelong race for global dominance” in artificial intelligence, said its president, Ali Fenn. Lancium, a company that provides land and power security for data centers In Texas. “Frankly, this is about national security and economic security,” she said. “They will continue to spend” because there is no more profitable place to deploy capital.
Renewable energy alone is not enough to meet their electricity needs. Developers say natural gas will have to play a role, which will slow progress towards CO2 emissions targets.
(See which stocks are helping fix the national grid here.)
Chief Energy Officer Nat Sahlstrom said data centers are now being sized to “leverage existing utility infrastructure,” regardless of where the power comes from. bookletis a Denver-based company that provides land, infrastructure and power resources for such facilities.
“The available land in this country, the industrial land that’s suitable for data center use cases, is becoming more and more constrained,” said Salstrom, who previously led Amazon’s energy, water and sustainability team.
Beyond Virginia
As land and power become more limited, data centers are expanding into new markets beyond the historic global hub of northern Virginia, Salstrom said. The power grid serving Virginia is facing looming reliability issues. Electricity demand is expected to surge while supply declines due to the retirement of coal-fired and some natural gas-fired power plants.
For example, Tract has raised more than 23,000 acres of land for data center development across the United States, including significant holdings in Maricopa County, Arizona, home to Phoenix, and Story County, Nevada, near Reno.
recent tracts Nearly 2,100 acres of land purchased Located in Buckeye, Arizona, the land is planned to be developed into one of the largest data center campuses in the United States. The private company is working with utility companies to provide up to 1.8 gigawatts of power to the site to support up to 40 separate data centers.
For context, a data center campus with 1 gigawatt of peak demand is roughly equivalent to the average annual electricity consumption of about 700,000 households, or a city of about 1.8 million people, according to CNBC’s data analysis. Department of Energy and Census Bureau.
According to statistics, a data center campus of this size will use more electricity in one year than retail electricity sales in Alaska, Rhode Island or Vermont. Department of Energy data.
Even a gigawatt data center campus operating at the lower end of peak demand is still roughly equivalent to about 330,000 homes, or a city with a population of over 800,000 (roughly the population of San Francisco).
The current average size of a single data center operated by a major technology company is about 40 megawatts, but campuses of 250 megawatts or more are about to grow, according to the Boston Consulting Group.
According to BCG, an increasing number of data center campuses with a capacity of 500 megawatts or more (equivalent to 0.5 gigawatts) are expected to appear in the United States from the 2030s to the mid-2040s. A facility of this size would be equivalent to about 350,000 homes, according to a CNBC analysis.
“Certainly, the average size of data centers is growing rapidly between now and 2030,” said Vivian Lee, managing director and partner at BCG.
community impact
Texas has become an increasingly attractive market due to a looser regulatory environment, abundant energy resources and easier customization for specific sites, Sahlstrom said. “Texas may be the best laboratory in the world for deploying its own power solutions,” energy officials said.
Finn, president of Houston-based Lancium, said the company was founded in 2017 with the idea of bringing large electric loads closer to abundant renewable energy resources in West and Central Texas. Initially focused on cryptocurrency mining, it later evolved into Lancium With the emergence of ChatGPT in late 2022, the company will shift its focus to powering artificial intelligence.
Today, Lancium has five data center campuses in various stages of development. The 1,000-acre Abilene campus is expected to be operational in the first quarter of 2025 and will generate 250 megawatts of electricity, increasing to 1.2 megawatts by 2026.
Fenn said the minimum power requirement for Lancium data center customers is now 1 gigawatt, and future plans include expanding that to 3 to 5 gigawatts.
Finn said that with a data center of this size, developers must ensure that power costs for neighboring communities do not rise as a result and that the reliability of the grid is maintained. Combining such facilities with new generation is critical, she said.
“Data centers have to work with utilities, system operators, communities to really make sure these things are assets to the grid, not liabilities to the grid,” Finn said. If such developments drive up residential and commercial electricity prices, “there’s no People will continue to approve”.
Renewable energy is not enough
Data center park operated by a listed company Equinics Jon Lin, the company’s general manager of data center services, said power is rising from 100 to 200 megawatts to hundreds of megawatts. Equinix is one of the world’s largest data center operators, with 260 data center facilities in 72 metropolitan areas in the United States and abroad.
Developers prefer carbon-free renewable energy, but they also argue that solar and wind power alone cannot meet current demand due to reliance on changing weather conditions.
Some of the world’s economy’s most critical workloads, such as financial transactions, run in data centers operated by Equinix, Lin said. The executive said that Equinix’s data center is online more than 99% of the time and there is no possibility of interruption.
“The stability of power is still very important for these data centers, so relying solely on local renewable energy to achieve this is frankly not an option,” Lin said.
Big tech companies are among the largest buyers of renewable energy in the United States, but they are increasingly turning to nuclear energy for a more reliable source of electricity. Microsoft Support the restart of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, through a power purchase agreement. Amazon and Alphabet’s Google are investing in small nuclear reactors.
But building new nuclear reactors is expensive and fraught with delays. Two new reactors in Georgia The latest launch is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.
Lancium’s Fenn said that in the short term, natural gas will provide most of the power needed by data centers. Natural gas is the primary short-term energy source that provides the reliability these facilities need, said Lee of Boston Consulting Group.
Lee said investments could be made in new natural gas-fired generation, adding carbon capture and battery storage technology over time to mitigate environmental impacts.
Finn said the industry hopes natural gas demand will gradually decrease as renewable energy expands, battery storage costs fall and artificial intelligence helps data centers operate more efficiently. But she said there was no doubt in the short term that data center expansion was disrupting technology companies’ emissions targets.
“Hopefully this is a short-term step,” Finn said of increased natural gas use. “What I see with our data center partners, with our hyperscale conversations, is we can’t let this adversely impact environmental goals.”
Note: CNBC analysis assumes that the data center campus continues to utilize 85% of its peak gigawatt demand throughout the year, for a total consumption of 7.4 billion kWh. The analysis used national household electricity consumption averages from the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and household size from the Census Bureau.
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