Notice how hot your cellphone gets when it multitasks on a steamy day? It doesn’t take much to make me put my keitai down and worry about it overheating.
Multiply that heat by, say, infinity, and you’ve got the biggest problem that data centers face in an increasingly digital world. An estimated 402.74 million terabytes of data are created each day and storing and processing all that information creates virtual volcanoes. The rise of artificial intelligence is compounding the problem.
In a much-cited report released earlier this year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated that electricity demand from data centers worldwide will more than double by 2030 to around 945 terawatt-hours, an amount that exceeds Japan’s current entire electricity consumption. By 2035, global data center electricity consumption will increase again by one-third to around 1,200 TWh. (Goldman Sachs reached roughly similar conclusions in reports issued last year.)
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