A modern hyperscale data centre can consume as much electricity as a city of 100,000 people. That was startling enough when these facilities mainly handled streaming, cloud storage and e-commerce.
But the rapid shift toward artificial intelligence – especially generative AI and large-scale inference – is driving energy consumption into unprecedented territory.
OpenAI, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and national governments around the world are preparing to build a new class of compute infrastructure: AI data centres, which are larger, hotter and far more power-hungry than anything the tech sector has deployed before. [Read more…] about The great AI power grab: Does the world have enough energy to feed AI data centers?