AI frenzy complicates efforts to keep data sites clean, green
West Texas, from the oil rigs of the Permian Basin to the wind turbines twirling above the High Plains, has long been a magnet for companies seeking fortunes in energy.
Now those arid ranch lands are offering a new moneymaking opportunity: data centers.
Lancium, an energy and data center management firm setting up shop in Fort Stockton and Abilene, is one of many companies around the country betting that building data centers close to generating sites will allow them to tap into underused clean power.
“It’s a land grab,” said Lancium’s president, Ali Fenn.
In the past, companies built data centers close to internet users, to better meet consumer requests, like streaming a show on Netflix or playing a video game hosted in the cloud. But the growth of artificial intelligence requires huge data centers to train the evolving largelanguage models, making proximity to users less necessary.
But as more of these sites start to pop up across the United States, there are new questions on whether they can meet the demand while still operating sustainably. The carbon footprint from the construction of the centers and the racks of expensive computer equipment is substantial in itself, and their power needs have grown considerably.
Just a decade ago, data centers drew 10 megawatts of power, but 100 megawatts is common today. The Uptime Institute, an industry advisory group, has identified 10 supersize cloud computing campuses across North America with an average size of 621 megawatts.
This growth in electricity demand comes as manufacturing in the United States is the highest in the past half-century, and the power grid is becoming increasingly strained.
The Uptime Institute predicted in a recent report that the sector’s myriad net-zero goals, which are self-imposed bench marks, would become much harder to meet in the face of this demand and that backtracking could become common.
“This is not just about data centers,” said Mark Dyson, a managing director at RMI, a nonprofit organization focused on sustainability. “Data centers are a practice round for a much bigger wave of load growth that we are already seeing and are going to continue seeing in this country coming from electrification of industry, vehicles and buildings.” The data center industry has embraced more sustainable solutions in recent years, becoming a significant investor in renewable power at the corporate level. Sites that leased wind and solar capacity jumped 50% year over year as of early 2023, to more than 40 gigawatts, capacity that continues to grow. Still, demand outpaces those investments. And the need for more processing power is backing up the interconnection queue and creating stopgap solutions.
Power-hungry data centers in full force further complicate the balance. Data centers in the construction pipeline would, when complete, use as much power annually as the San Francisco metro area, according to a report released Wednesday by the real estate services company JLL. Most sites coming online this year are already leased; in popular markets, significant space will not open up for at least two years.
“You have to get as many gigawatts live as you possibly can, as fast as you can,” Fenn of Lancium said. “People are going to cobble that together in whatever way they can.”
That has quickly expanded development beyond the established first- and second-tier markets, such as northern Virginia, Dallas and Silicon Valley.
Competition is growing in parts of the country offering cheap land and available power. Amazon, for instance, announced last month that it was planning a $10 billion project in Mississippi, the state’s largest economic development project, which includes data centers and solar-generating sites.
“Anybody who has any significant source of power has now become a new data center market,” said Jim Kerrigan, managing principal of North American Data Centers, an industry consultancy.
AI is only a small percentage of the global data center footprint. The Uptime Institute predicts AI will skyrocket to 10% of the sector’s global power use by 2025, from 2% today.
Last year, construction of data centers was up 25%, according to the real estate firm CBRE. And Nvidia, which supplies most of the high-tech chips powering this technology, last week reported record profit in data center sales, with 2023 revenue hitting $47.5 billion, a 217% jump from the year before.
The nation’s energy grids cannot handle that kind of demand, said Christopher Wellise, vice president of sustainability at Equinix, a global data center operator.
“Technology is moving faster than our infrastructure has evolved,” he said.
On top of that, the transition toward electrification and renewable power has created new challenges. Orders for the large transformers needed to deliver power have a three-year backlog, and even the diesel generators that provide backup power can take nearly two years to arrive.
Developers are focusing on squeezing additional efficiency out of their operations. Meta has teamed up with a Texas battery storage provider to better use the state’s wind and solar resources. Google signed a deal with Fervo, a company developing utility-scale geothermal resources.