Cutting Data Center Energy Consumption...

Everyone in the power generation business is talking about the huge increase in data center energy consumption. The IEA released a report on April 10th saying that data center energy use would double in the next five years, with a 4x increase in energy required to run AI models. The IEA forecasts that by 2030, data center energy demand will exceed the aggregate energy demand of the entire nation of Japan.

The climate impact of this power consumption cannot be overstated. Some portion of energy generation capacity will be provided by clean energy sources, but the projected jump in demand is so large that utilities are postponing decommissioning of large-carbon-footprint coal-fired plants.

Nexalus, a startup based in Ireland, the data center capital of Europe, has developed an innovative way to lower data center power consumption by over one-third and use the “waste heat” from these facilities to do other useful work, thereby lowering overall electricity consumption and fossil fuel demand.

The basics of data center energy consumption

You would think that most of the energy consumed by a data center powers its servers. Think again. The industry metric PUE (power usage effectiveness) is the ratio of data center facility power use to the amount of power going to the servers. According to the U.S. EPA, the average PUE for a domestic data center is 2.0, meaning that a data center uses two watts of power for every one watt used by its servers.

Where does the other half of the energy go? Mainly, it goes into cooling the servers’ chips, which heat up while performing 50 trillion floating-point calculations per second so you and your coworkers can enjoy doctored images of a Cybertruck crushed by a block of cheese. This is why you see so many air conditioner compressors in photos of data centers.

For further insight – Read the full Forbes Article here