Over the past few months, the newswires have been hot with stories about the large-scale data centres that will be required to meet the needs of the forthcoming revolution in Artificial Intelligence (AI). How much electricity will these new data centres consume and what does that mean for the electricity demand forecasts underpinning the plans for Net Zero?
Recent Date Centre Announcements
To give a flavour of the scale of data centre developments that are coming, it is helpful to look at recent announcements from large tech companies. Back in March, it was announced that Amazon had bought a 960MW data centre that is powered by an adjacent nuclear power station. In April, Mark Zuckerberg CEO of Meta that owns Facebook and Instagram said energy requirements may hold back the build out of AI data centres. He also talked about building data centres that would consume 1GW of power.
Last month, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison announced that Oracle was designing a data centre that would consume more than 1GW that would be powered by three small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). Then Microsoft also got in on the act when it announced it had done a deal with U.S. utility Constellation to restart the 835MW Three Mile Island (TMI) Unit 1 nuclear power plant to power its data centres. Anxious not to be left out, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google said they too were working on 1GW data centres and saw money being invested in SMRs.
Finally, Sam Altman of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT has trumped them all by pitching the idea of 5GW data centres to the White House. Altman has been heard talking of building five to seven of these leviathans.
Bloomberg, usually a driver of the Net Zero band wagon, has reluctantly admitted that there’s not enough clean energy – nuclear or otherwise – to satisfy AI’s voracious appetite and gas will have to fill the gap. America’s national security and energy security is eclipsing climate concerns.
This admission is important because it acknowledges that such important infrastructure cannot rely upon the vicissitudes of the weather. These data centres need a source of electricity that is reliable and always available. It would be absurd to think that a ChatGPT user will want to receive a message saying their request cannot be processed because it is not windy enough.
Hellbound and Down 