NEW YORK – Tech giants are racing to ward off a carbon time bomb caused by the massive data centres they are building around the world.
A technique pioneered by Google is gaining currency as more power-hungry artificial intelligence comes online: Using software to hunt for clean electricity in parts of the world with excess sun and wind on the grid, then ramping up data centre operations there. Doing so could cut carbon and costs.
There’s an urgent need to figure out how to run data centres in ways that maximise renewable energy usage, said Chris Noble, co-founder and chief executive officer of Cirrus Nexus, a cloud-computing manager tapping data centres owned by Google, Microsoft and Amazon.
The climate risks sparked by AI-driven computing are far-reaching – and will worsen without a big shift from fossil fuel-based electricity to clean power. Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang has said AI has hit a “tipping point.” He has also said that the cost of data centres will double within five years to power the rise of new software.
Already, data centres and transmission networks each account for up to 1.5 per cent of global consumption, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Together, they’re responsible for emitting about as much carbon dioxide as Brazil annually.
Hyperscalers – as the biggest data centre owners like Google, Microsoft and Amazon are known – have all set climate goals and are facing internal and external pressure to deliver on them. Those lofty targets include decarbonising their operations.
But the rise of AI is already wreaking havoc on those goals. Graphics processing units have been key to the rise of large language models and use more electricity than central processing units used in other forms of computing. Training an AI model uses more power than 100 households in a year, according to IEA estimates.
“The growth in AI is far outstripping the ability to produce clean power for it,” he said.
Moreover, AI’s energy consumption is volatile and more akin to a sawtooth graph than a smooth line that most data centre operators are used to. That makes decarbonisation a challenge, to say nothing of ensuring grid stability.
AI’s growth is being driven by North American companies, keeping computing power – and energy usage – concentrated there, said Dave Sterlace, account director for global data centres at Hitachi Energy. That’s a trend he didn’t expect two years ago.
To lower data centre CO2 emissions, hyperscalers and other data centre providers have financed massive amounts of solar or wind farms and used credits to offset emissions. (In the case of credits, some have failed to have a meaningful impact on emissions.)
But that alone won’t be enough, especially as AI use ticks up. That’s why operators are turning to the strategy employed by Alphabet Inc unit Google called load shifting. The idea: Lower emissions by upending the way data centres function.
Today, most data centres seek to operate in a “steady state,” such that their energy consumption is fairly stable. That leaves them at the mercy of the grid they are connected to and whatever the day’s mix of natural gas, nuclear and renewable power generation is given the lack of transmission lines between regions. To break their reliance on dirtier grids, tech giants are looking for opportunities to shift daily or even hourly data centre operations around the world in an effort to soak up excess renewable energy production.
Google launched the first effort to match its power usage at certain data centres with zero-carbon power on an hourly basis in a bid to get its machines running on clean energy 24/7. No one has fully achieved that goal yet. And, to be sure, the strategy of shifting loads around the world might be complicated by countries pushing for data sovereignty policies that attempt to restrict and safeguard the flow of data across borders. But what Cirrus Nexus and Google are testing could still be a critical piece of the puzzle for cutting emissions.
Manhattan-based Cirrus Nexus scours the world’s power grids and measures emissions in five-minute increments to find the least polluting computing resources for itself and its clients in industries that range from pharmaceuticals to accounting. The company had a chance to put that search into practice last summer.
