The new data centres we’re putting in to support AI require 10, 15, even 20 times the power of the ones we were building before.” The potential environmental costs of all this were off the agenda at the Paris AI summit – where the US delegation lobbied to remove all mentions of climate change from joint statements.
Data centres already consume 460 terawatt hours of electricity per year, or 1.3 per cent of the world’s entire supply – about as much as France – and the International Energy Agency predicts this will more than double by 2026.
Another example closer to home is Ireland, where data centres now use up 21 per cent of the country’s electricity supply.
“Data is the dirty secret of the tech industry,” says Matt Watts of the data management company NetApp.
There are different names for this: dark data, dirty data, single-use data.
