ABC News examines solutions to problems related to climate change and the environment in its “The Power of Us: People, The Climate, and Our Future” series.
Artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, remote working, and many more, all of these hot trends rely on the processing power provided by a vast global network of data centers.
As demand surges for power-intensive complexes, which typically measure 100,000 square feet, increased energy use could jeopardize carbon emissions reductions and tackling climate change, experts say ABC News told.
“The growth trend is very fast,” Fengqi Yu, a professor of energy engineering at Cornell University, told ABC News. This is what I'm curious about.
According to an International Energy Agency report released in January, approximately 2,700 data centers in the United States accounted for more than 4% of the nation's electricity use in 2022. By 2026, its share in electricity usage is expected to reach 6%.
The report said data centers' share of U.S. electricity usage is expected to continue to increase in the coming years, citing the expected widespread adoption of AI and cryptocurrencies.
By 2026, the AI industry alone is expected to consume at least 10 times more energy than it did just three years ago, according to an IEA report.
Nvidia, the California-based company behind the AI boom and selling most of the computer chips, embodies this growth. The company's revenue rose 265% year-on-year in the three months to January, according to its financial report.
“If NVIDIA continues to grow as expected and sell as planned, we will see a pretty significant increase in energy usage,” said Arman Shehabi, staff scientist for energy technologies at Lawrence Berkeley. Masu. National Institute told ABC News.
In response to a request for comment from ABC News, an NVIDIA spokesperson said NVIDIA uses accelerated computing, enabled by special hardware called graphics processing units (GPUs), so the company's said its products reduce energy usage in data centers.
“By replacing traditional servers with GPU-accelerated systems, data center energy usage is reduced, not increased. For example, a single GPU-accelerated server can replace hundreds of traditional servers. , the same workload can be achieved,” the spokesperson said. Our GPUs also enable AI-enhanced systems that improve energy efficiency across all industries, including transportation, manufacturing, logistics, and energy. ”
In its annual corporate responsibility report for fiscal year 2023, the company highlighted that it is an AI-driven tool that helps address climate change, including carbon reduction and management.
Meanwhile, cryptocurrencies will account for about 0.4% of global energy consumption in 2022, equivalent to the total energy use of the Netherlands in the same year, the IEA report found. The primary burden placed on data centers by cryptocurrencies is the result of cryptocurrency mining, which is the computing process used to complete transactions and generate new coins.
Additionally, the shift to remote work has caused demand for data center usage to spike by up to 35% during the COVID-19 pandemic, Tebfik Kosar, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University at Buffalo, told ABC News.
Demand growth has slowed as more employees return to work, but the persistence of hybrid work arrangements has pushed demand for these data centers above pre-pandemic levels, he added.
“That capacity increase didn't really get us back to normal,” Kosar said.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's website, the power sector will account for nearly a quarter of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions in 2022, making it the second-largest industrial emitter after transportation. More than half of the nation's electricity came from fossil fuel sources such as coal and natural gas, the EPA added.
The information technology sector, dominated by data centers, accounts for about 3% of global carbon emissions, comparable to the aviation industry's share of global emissions, Kosar said.
“It's not that small,” he pointed out.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Shehabi said efforts are underway to improve the sustainability of data centers by connecting them to renewable power sources. Data centers will boom in the coming years, Shehabi said, providing a test case for how to respond to surges in power usage while addressing climate impacts.
Shehabi added: “How we deal with this growth will set the stage for how we deal with growth in other economic sectors in a sustainable way for decades to come.” Ta.
