#AI#GenerativeAI#Energy#DataCenters: "The rapid growth of the technology industry and the increasing reliance on cloud computing and artificial intelligence have led to a boom in the construction of data centers across the United States. Electric vehicles, wind and solar energy, and the smart grid are particularly reliant on data centers to optimize energy utilization. These facilities house thousands of servers that require constant cooling to prevent overheating and ensure optimal performance.
Unfortunately, many data centers rely on water-intensive cooling systems that consume millions of gallons of potable (“drinking”) water annually. A single data center can consume up to 3 million to 5 million gallons of drinking water per day, enough to supply thousands of households or farms.
The increasing use and training of AI models has further exacerbated the water consumption challenges faced by data centers."
I keep seeing these stories about huge investments Microsoft, Amazon, and other major tech companies are making around the world. They’re almost always for massive, resource-hungry data centers to power their AI ambitions.
#Microsoft#FossilFuels#BigTech#DataCenters#Environment: "For nearly a decade, Holly Alpine (née Beale) loved working at Microsoft. Shortly after finishing college, in July 2014, she landed a job there as a technical account manager. Less than four years later, Alpine was leading a program that invests in environmental projects in the communities where Microsoft’s data centers are located. She was also helping organize a worker-led sustainability group called the Sustainability Connected Community, which would grow to nearly 10,000 Microsoft employees worldwide by late 2023.
But at the end of last year, Alpine reached a painful decision: She could no longer ethically work at Microsoft. On January 24, 2024, Alpine sent an email to Microsoft president Brad Smith, CEO Satya Nadella, and several other senior company officials, letting them know why.
Writing on behalf of herself and a colleague who resigned at the same time, Alpine told the tech giant’s top brass that the two were quitting in “no small part” due to Microsoft’s work for the fossil fuel industry aimed at automating and accelerating oil extraction."
#Vietnam#DataCenters#DigitalSovereignty: "Viettel projects the south-east Asian country’s data centre market will expand 15 per cent a year for the foreseeable future, possibly more if a big cloud company such as Alibaba invests there, the company said.
The expansion is fuelled in part by the data localisation rules, which Hanoi admits violate its free trade agreements but which ease the one-party state’s ability to access data.
The rules have been a boon for cloud providers that already have server farms in Vietnam, including gaming unicorn VNG and IT company CMC, which said it would construct at least two data centres in the next few years, potentially doubling its capacity."
But data centres’ voracious power needs are set to rocket, as cloud storage facilities, crypto mining and AI all add strain to grids. Microsoft alone is opening a new data centre globally every three days.
These power hungry operations will together consume more than 480 terawatt hours of electricity, or almost a tenth of total US power demand, by 2035, up from 4.5 per cent in 2025, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights.
The International Energy Agency estimates power demand from data centres globally could top 1,000 TWh by 2026 — double 2022 levels and an increase equivalent to Germany’s total power demand.
Dominion Energy, which supplies Virginia’s fast-growing data centre sector, said in a recent strategic plan that until zero-carbon energy could offer constant power, gas units would be the “most affordable and reliable” option." https://www.ft.com/content/1f93b9b2-b264-44e2-87cc-83c04d8f1e2b
"We must think more deliberately about which technologies are necessary to build a better world and where it actually makes sense to roll out digital tech or AI tools. Those democratic deliberations can’t just be based on the marketing claims of tech companies, but need to account for the real impacts and material footprints of those technologies."
#AI#QuantumComputing#DataCenters#Energy: "Official data showed that in the Republic of Ireland, which is home to the European headquarters of several big tech firms such as Google and Facebook-parent Meta, data centres accounted for nearly a fifth of all electricity used in 2022.
The amount of electricity being used by data centres in the country has risen by 400% since 2015 and ignited debate about capacity.
Meanwhile, quantum computers, which process data differently to regular computers and can complete complex calculations very quickly, are still mostly being used experimentally to see what they can do.
"...so in The Dalles, there’s some additional data centers being built by Google, and the water consumption from those data centers, according to some recent reports, has nearly tripled in the last five years. Those data centers now consume more than a quarter of all of the water used in the city, which is kind of a wild statistic."
Science Friday: Understanding And Curbing Generative AI's Energy Consumption
#AI#GenerativeAI#LatinAmerica#Energy#DataCenters: "- AI use is surging astronomically around the globe, requiring vastly more energy to make AI-friendly semiconductor chips and causing a gigantic explosion in data center construction. So large and rapid is this expansion that Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, has warned that AI is driving humanity toward a “catastrophic energy crisis.”
Altman’s solution is an audacious plan to spend up to $7 trillion to produce energy from nuclear fusion. But even if this investment, the biggest in all of history, occurred, its impact wouldn’t be felt until mid-century, and do little to end the energy and water crises triggered by AI manufacture and use, while having huge mining and toxic waste impacts.
Data centers are mushrooming worldwide to meet AI demand, but particularly in Latin America, seen as strategically located by Big Tech. One of the largest data center hubs is in Querétaro, a Mexican state with high risk of intensifying climate change-induced drought. Farmers are already protesting their risk of losing water access.
#AI#DataCenters#Drought#WaterScarcity: "Public data hint at the potential toll of this approach. Researchers at UC Riverside estimated last year, for example, that global AI demand could cause data centers to suck up 1.1 trillion to 1.7 trillion gallons of freshwater by 2027. A separate study from a university in the Netherlands, this one peer-reviewed, found that AI servers’ electricity demand could grow, over the same period, to be on the order of 100 terawatt hours per year, about as much as the entire annual consumption of Argentina or Sweden. Microsoft’s own environmental reports show that, during the initial uptick in the AI platform’s growth, the company’s resource consumption was accelerating. In fiscal year 2022, the most recent year for which Microsoft has released data, the tech giant’s use of water and electricity grew by about a third; in absolute terms, it was the company’s largest-ever reported increase, year to year."
"#Ryan and #Coveney in heated row over data centres"
Okay, so I was just having a discussion about this on Mastodon the other day. It's 2024, dammit. #DataCenters should only get approval from the #government entities regulating them IF they are demonstrably #carbonneutral. Full stop.
The province of #NewBrunswick is home to the largest oil refinery in #canada. It uses a LOT of electricity -- so much that in order to avoid grid strain and save $$, they built their own 88MW LNG-burning power plant.
We are also home to two "small" #cryptomines which combined consume 96MW of electricity.
The rapid expansion of #oilAndGas, #LNG, #crypto, and #dataCenters threaten to destabilise grids world-wide. This is a big problem, and communities need to do more to STOP these projects cold!
NB government despite their track record of sadistic ineptitud, banned our power utility from servicing any future crypto mines.
The energy consumption of servers have been problematic for some time now.
Our buddies at #Leafcloud are showing us how they use the thermal energy generated by their servers, to provide heat to everything from swimming-pools to large residential complexes. Using this energy as a resource rather than wasting it.
#DataCenters#AI#CloudComputing#Water#Energy: "Meanwhile, the more than 75 data centers operating in Ireland consume so much power they’re making it harder to achieve the country’s climate goals and have some political parties proposing outright moratoriums on data center construction. Experts in New Zealand are concerned about similar issues after plans by Amazon and Microsoft to build hyperscale data centers that will primarily serve overseas users, while both Singapore and the Netherlands have instituted data center moratoriums of their own over concerns about high energy use.
In the United States, data centers are one of the top ten water-consuming industries and have a tendency to be located in areas of the country where energy is cheap and less carbon intensive, but where water is often scarce. Last year, Arizona’s governor limited data center construction around Phoenix over concerns around water availability. The Oregonian had to fight for 13 months to find out how much water Google was using in The Dalles. In 2022, it was finally revealed the company was responsible for 29% of all water use the previous year in the city where it built its first data center, and the quantity of water had tripled over the five prior years."
#Chile#DataCenters#Activism: "In recent years, there’s been a growing awareness of vast amounts of water and energy used by the data centers that power everything we do online — and that’s only become more intense as tech companies have begun pushing AI tools that require even more computing power. Around the world, that’s leading to increased opposition when companies propose erecting massive facilities to store all those servers near people’s communities.
To learn more about this, I spoke to Sebastián Lehuedé, a lecturer in ethics, AI, and society in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. He’s been researching the connection between AI and environmental justice, which led him to get to know activists in Chile who campaigned against a data center proposed in an industrial part of Santiago and halted it by telling the community what Google was trying to hide.
This story pushes us to consider the material impacts of computation and the trade offs we make when companies push us to adopt more resource-intensive digital tools. Are the community impacts and the resource demands worth it so we can ask a chatbot dumb questions or rip off the work of an artist? I’ll have more reflections on that later this week, but for now, enjoy this interview with Sebastián!"
#AI#DataCenters#Electricity#Energy: "This is how it is in much of the US, where electric utilities and regulators have been caught off guard by the biggest jump in demand in a generation. One of the things they didn’t properly plan for is AI, an immensely power-hungry technology that uses specialized microchips to process mountains of data. Electricity consumption at US data centers alone is poised to triple from 2022 levels, to as much as 390 terawatt hours by the end of the decade, according to Boston Consulting Group. That’s equal to about 7.5% of the nation’s projected electricity demand. “We do need way more energy in the world than we thought we needed before,” Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, whose ChatGPT tool has become a global phenomenon, said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week. “We still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology.”
For decades, US electricity demand rose by less than 1% annually. But utilities and grid operators have doubled their annual forecasts for the next five years to about 1.5%, according to Grid Strategies, a consulting firm that based its analysis on regulatory filings. That’s the highest since the 1990s, before the US stepped up efforts to make homes and businesses more energy efficient."
#DataCenters#Cloud#Energy#Electricity#AI#Cryptocurrencies: "Global electricity demand from data centers, cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence could more than double over the next three years, adding the equivalent of Germany’s entire power needs, the International Energy Agency forecasts in its latest report.
There are more than 8,000 data centers globally, with about 33% in the US, 16% in Europe and close to 10% in China, with more planned. In Ireland, where data centers are developing rapidly, the IEA expects the sector to consume 32% of the country’s total electricity by 2026 compared to 17% in 2022. Ireland currently has 82 centers; 14 are under construction and 40 more are approved.
Overall global electricity demand is expected to see a 3.4% increase until 2026, the report found. The increase, however, will be more than covered by renewables, such as wind, solar and hydro, and all-time high nuclear power."