The amount of electricity needed to power the world’s data centres is expected to double in the next five years, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
It will come as racks of servers hosting the latest AI models and cloud computing services use three times more electricity than the UK each year, the agency added.
The rise in demand, predicted to be highly concentrated around the world’s tech and population hubs, will put pressure on utility companies, grid infrastructure and the planet.
“AI is one of the biggest stories in the energy world today,” says Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA.
“In the United States, data centres are on course to account for almost half of the growth in electricity demand; in Japan, more than half; and in Malaysia, as much as one-fifth.”
In the US, data centres, largely being built to train and operate AI, are expected to consume more electricity by 2030 than the manufacturing of all the nation’s energy-intensive goods including aluminium, steel, cement and chemicals, a report from the IEA found.
But the agency also predicts that AI will be an essential tool in informing how to manage future energy demand, engineer more efficient data centres and accelerate the development of new, cleaner sources of electricity generation.
Two main shifts have driven the AI revolution and its incredible demand for power.
The cost of “compute” – the processors and associated servers to build data centres – has fallen by 99% since 2006.
Whereas the amount of compute being used to train and run state-of-the-art AI models has increased by a mind-boggling 350,000-fold in just a decade.
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