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At last – one corporate newsmedia admits there is no “cloud” – only dirty great steel structures

Stopping the great AI energy squeeze will need more than data centres

 Amazon Web Services is currently rolling out €30bn of investments in
Europe amid a boom in artificial intelligence, according to Neil Morris,
its Irish head. But none of that bonanza is going to Ireland, because
Amazon officials worry about future energy constraints.

Indeed, there are reports that the company has already been rerouting some cloud activity
because of this. And while the Irish government has pledged to expand the
grid, mostly via wind farms, this is not happening fast enough to meet
demand. The water infrastructure is creaking too. Yes, you read that right:
an (in)famously wet and windy country is struggling to sustain tech with
water and wind power. There are at least four sobering lessons here. First,
this saga shows that our popular discourse around tech innovation is, at
best, limited and, at worst, delusional.

More specifically, in modern
culture we tend to talk about the internet and AI as if it they were a
purely disembodied thing (like a “cloud”). As a consequence,
politicians and voters often overlook the unglamorous physical
infrastructure that makes this “thing” work, such as data centres,
power lines and undersea cables.

But this oft-ignored hardware is essential
to the operation of our modern digital economy, and we urgently need to pay
it more respect and attention. Second, we need to realise this
infrastructure is also increasingly under strain. In recent years the
energy consumption of data centres has been fairly stable, because rising
levels of internet usage were offset by rising energy efficiency.

However, this is now changing fast: AI queries use around 10 times more energy than
existing search engines. Thus the electricity consumption of data centres
will at least double by 2026, according to the International Energy Agency
— and in the US they are expected to consume nine per cent of all
electricity by 2030. In Ireland the usage has already exploded to over a
fifth of the grid — more than households.

 FT 4th Oct 2024,
https://www-ft-com.ezphost.dur.ac.uk/content/4fd66b27-f51b-4029-af3a-f5521368046f

October 8, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Ireland, spinbuster, technology