Tech giants are racing to fend off the carbon time bomb caused by the massive data centers they are building around the world.
A technique pioneered by Google is gaining popularity as energy-hungry artificial intelligence comes online: using software to search for clean electricity in parts of the world with excess solar and wind on the grid, then scaling up data center operations there. This could reduce carbon and costs.
There is an urgent need to figure out how to manage data centers in ways that maximize the use of renewable energy, said Chris Noble, co-founder and CEO of Cirrus Nexus, a cloud computing manager that uses data centers owned by Google, Microsoft and Amazon.
The climate risks posed by AI-powered computing are far-reaching — and will worsen without a major shift from fossil fuel-based electricity to clean energy. Chief Executive Officer of Nvidia Corp. Jensen Huang said artificial intelligence has reached a “tipping point”. He also said the price of data centers will double within five years to fuel the rise of new software.
According to the International Energy Agency, data centers and transmission networks already account for up to 1.5% of global consumption. Together, they are responsible for the annual emission of about as much carbon dioxide as Brazil.
Hyperscalers — as the biggest data center owners like Google, Microsoft and Amazon are known — have all set climate targets and are facing internal and external pressure to meet them. These lofty goals include decarbonizing their business.
But the rise of artificial intelligence is already destroying those goals. Graphics processing units were key to the rise of large language models and consume more electricity than central processing units used in other forms of computing. Training an AI model uses more energy than 100 households annually, according to IEA estimates.
“The growth of artificial intelligence far exceeds the ability to produce clean energy for it,” he said.
Moreover, AI power consumption is erratic and more like a sawtooth graph than the smooth line most data center operators are used to. This makes decarbonisation a challenge, not to mention ensuring grid stability.
AI growth is being driven by North American companies, keeping computing power — and energy consumption — concentrated there, said Dave Sterlace, account director for global data centers at Hitachi Energy. This is a trend he did not expect two years ago.
To reduce data center CO2 emissions, hyperscalers and other data center providers have financed massive amounts of solar or wind power and used credits to offset emissions. (In the case of loans, some have failed to significantly affect emissions.)
But that alone will not be enough, especially as the use of artificial intelligence grows. That’s why operators are turning to the strategy used by Alphabet Inc. a Google unit called load shifting. The idea: Reduce emissions by changing the way data centers operate.
Today, most data centers tend to operate in “steady state”, so their power consumption is fairly stable. This leaves them at the mercy of the grid they are connected to and regardless of the daily mix of natural gas, nuclear and renewable energy given the lack of transmission lines between regions. To break their dependence on dirtier grids, tech giants are looking for opportunities to shift daily or even hourly operations of data centers around the world in an effort to absorb excess renewable energy production.
Google has launched the first attempt to match its power consumption in certain data centers with zero carbon hourly emissions in a bid to keep its machines running on clean energy 24/7. No one has yet fully achieved that goal. And, to be sure, a worldwide burden-shifting strategy could be complicated by states pushing data sovereignty policies that attempt to limit and protect the flow of data across borders. But what Cirrus Nexus and Google are testing could still be a key piece of the emissions reduction puzzle.
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 ranging from pharmaceuticals to accounting. The company had the opportunity to put that search into practice last summer.
The Netherlands was in the midst of its sunniest June ever, causing the price of grid solar to drop. This made server operation cheaper and less carbon intensive. Cirrus Nexus then shifted its computing workload to California after the sun set in the Netherlands, allowing it to use the solar power that had just been turned on for the day in the Golden State.
Chasing the sun from Europe to the US West Coast and back, the company was able to reduce computing emissions for certain workloads for itself and clients by 34%, rather than relying solely on servers in both locations, according to company data shared with Bloomberg Green. Making business flexible for this comes with benefits and risks.
The ability to seek out zero-carbon spare megawatts can help reduce the load on grids, such as during a heat wave or cold winter storm. But data centers must work with utilities and network operators because large changes in demand can throw power systems into disarray, increasing the likelihood of blackouts. Dominion Energy, which is seeing a spike in demand for data centers at its Virginia utility, is working on a program to use load shifting in data centers to reduce stress on the grid during extreme weather.
In recent years, Google and Amazon have tested changing the use of data centers for their own operations and for customers using their cloud services. (Cirrus Nexus, for example, uses cloud services offered by Amazon, Microsoft and Google.) In Virginia, Microsoft signed a contract with Constellation Energy Corp. which guarantees that more than 90% of the energy for its regional data center will be carbon-free. energy. Reaching 100%, however, remains an incredible goal for him and other hyperscalers.
Google’s data centers run on carbon-free energy about 64% of the time, with 13 regional locations achieving 85% and seven just over 90% globally, said Michael Terrell, who leads Google’s 24/7 carbon-free energy strategy.
“But if you’re not displacing fossil fuels, then you’re not fully meeting your climate goals,” Terrell said.