Constraints in Data Center Space, Electric Power Pinching Growth of AI
Data center power and capacity demands projected to grow dramatically, driving energy efficient design and cooperation with local governments to find sustainable energy sources
By John P. Desmond, Editor, AI in Business
The growth of AI is outpacing available data center space and the electrical power needed to power them, which has led some countries to impose limits on data center construction.
The growing demands of AI are expected to cause data center storage capacity to grow from 10.1 zettabytes (ZB) in 2023, to 21 ZB in 2027, a five-year annual growth rate of 18.5 percent, according to a recent report from JLL, a commercial real estate management firm.
Generative AI has greater energy requirements, ranging from 300 to 500 MW, which is driving more energy efficient designs and work with local governments to find sustainable energy sources that can support the power demands of data centers.
As the amount of computing equipment installed increases with AI demand, data centers will generate more heat. Cooling typically accounts for some 40 percent of a data center’s electricity use, the JLL report states. As a result, operators are chafing to liquid cooling, which has been shown to significantly reduce power consumption.
“In addition to location and design considerations, data center operators are starting to explore alternative power sourcing strategies for onsite power generation including small modular reactors (SMRs), hydrogen fuel cells and natural gas.” stated Andy Cvengros, managing director for US data center markets for JLL. “With power grids becoming effectively tapped out and transformers having more than three-year lead times, operators will need to innovate.”
Massive investments are required to upgrade electrical energy production and distribution worldwide, the authors state. For example:
In Europe, one-third of the grid infrastructure is over 40 years old and will require an estimated $739 billion of investment by 2030 to meet the green goals of the European Union;
In the US, an upgraded grid that can feed more renewable energy into the power supply will require an estimated $2 trillion investment;
The rapid growth of data centers is putting pressure on limited energy supplies in many countries; The government of Singapore recently imposed a moratorium on data center construction in certain regions, to allow time to assess whether the construction is in line with the county’s sustainability goals.
“Generative AI will continue to fuel demand for specialized and redesigned data centers, and developers and operators who can provide sustainable computing power will reap the rewards of the data-intense digital economy,” state the authors of the JLL report.
Ireland Has Imposed Limits on Data Center Construction
In Ireland, data centers use about 10 percent of available electricity, according to a recent account in Data Center Dynamics, partly out of fear that data center operators will buy up so much power that not enough will be left for the country to decarbonize sectors such as heating and transportation, according to the authors.
Ireland’s Commission for the Regulation of Utilities announced in 2022 that limits to new data center construction must be put in place. The country has set a goal of 80 percent of its electricity to come from renewable sources by 2030.
In Virginia in the US, Dominion Power announced in 2022 that it could no longer guarantee its ability to distribute needed electricity via overhead power lines, citing a distribution issue. Loudoun County is a fast-growing data center hub, with 26 million square feet of data center space installed as of 2022, five million more square feet in development, and many more planned. The data centers provide one-third of the county’s tax income.
“There's an exponentially increasing demand for power due to the advent of AI and machine learning,” stated Jeff Gyzen, mission-critical facilities lead at the US architecture and engineering firm Arcadis, at a DCD panel last year.
Electricity Generation, Distribution Constraints Also Limiting
It takes years to plan and build a new data center, and years to plan upgrades to the electric distribution infrastructure, wherever in the US it is needed, according to Bob Salter, an energy consultant and professor at Sonoma State University in California. “It’s a supply chain problem,” he stated in the DCD account. “Supply and demand are out of whack.”
Global demand for electric power is expected to grow by 50 percent in the next 20 years, as home heating and transportation shift from fossil fuel to green electricity. “Data centers are expected to grow from three percent to four percent of total global power demand in that timeframe,” stated Salter, “and things like vehicle electrification are increasing competition for electrical energy.”
But, “A data center is a one to two-year build cycle and electrical energy availability is three years to none.”
More is being invested to increase the electricity output from solar power and wind farms; it will take a lot. “The surface area required to produce 200MW is huge,” stated Salter. The US National Renewable Energy Laboratory suggests each MW of solar requires six to 10 acres, a fluid number depending on sunny days. A 200MW solar farm would cover a couple of square miles, according to the DCD report.
More data centers are seen planning for their own power supplies going forward. “There's been a movement to isolate from the grid, until the utilities can catch up with all this demand,” stated Gyzen of Arcadis. “If you do it right, it’s actually extremely beneficial to the environment, with the potential for net-zero emissions.”
He added, “If there wasn't the delay in getting the power right now, this is actually a better solution. It's a greener solution. And it's a cheaper solution, because you're saving power costs. I just don't see why you wouldn't do it.”
The importance of data centers in everyday life is often overlooked, observed Raul Martynek, CEO of DataBank, a data center provider, in a recent account in built in. “Whenever you scroll through social media, send a Slack message, order a vacuum on Amazon or send money through Zelle, you’re relying on a data center to process each one of those digital actions,” he stated. “They’re the cornerstone of our IT infrastructure.”
Data center vacancy rates were 4.4 percent in 2022, according to a report from Data Center Hawk he cited. Last year, they slipped to 2.9 percent in the top 10 North American markets, meaning capability for new work is close to non-existent for the current data center infrastructure.
Martynek condensed the reasons for a data center shortage to four: capital, time, space and power. Regarding time, the long build-cycle for new data centers is an issue.
Data center builders may have multiple projects going at once, but most are months to years away from completion. “One data center takes anywhere from 24 to 36 months to build,” stated Martynek. “And many were built based on far more modest demand projections, before the current demand skyrocketed. “
Moreover, the required mechanical, electrical cooling systems to power and cool modern data centers are experiencing supply chain challenges. “Those timelines have gone from 12-to-24 weeks of lead time two years ago to 52-to-80 weeks of lead time,” Martynek stated.
Regarding space, it is not only AI driving demand for new data centers, it is the natural growth of public cloud and traditional enterprise tech deployments. As a suggestion, Martynek advised data center designers to design new facilities to accommodate a range of workloads, from raised-floor, air-cooled enterprise applications, to slab-floor and water-cooled hyperscale cloud or high performance computing workloads. He stated, “This ensures that whatever capacity is brought online can be quickly adapted to the market’s most critical choke points.”
Read the source articles and information from JLL, in Data Center Dynamics and in built in.
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