Thematic Intelligence: Deep Dive into the Environmental Impact of Data Centers

Thematic Intelligence: Deep Dive into the Environmental Impact of Data Centers

Summary

Growth in artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly increased the demand for data processing capabilities and capacity, leading to the expansion of data centers globally. As these data centers consume vast amounts of energy and water, and heavily contribute to CO2 emissions, they pose a significant environmental challenge. Initiatives to make data centers more sustainable include increased use of renewables, more effective cooling technologies, and design optimization.

Key Highlights

• Overheating of the IT equipment can lead to failure and inefficiencies. As the number and scale of AI and generative AI (GenAI) applications grow, managing these temperatures is increasingly important.
• Big Tech is increasing its water consumption for cooling purposes. However, water cooling is not ideal in the long term due to the scarcity of water in certain areas and because it is ultimately a finite resource.
• Emerging cooling technologies include immersion cooling using dielectric fluids and the use of ceramic components for circuit boards and semiconductors. Future cooling methods being explored are underwater data centers and data centers in space.

• Data centers are critical infrastructure in today’s digital world. However, they have a big environmental impact, which was exacerbated by the advent of generative AI. This Deep Dive report looks in detail at the environmental impact of data centers and highlights new approaches to winning the war against heat.

• It is expected that investments in data center capacity specifically optimized for AI workloads will dramatically accelerate, and as the carbon footprint of data centers materially increases, it will become a problem for AI adoption, particularly in the context of ESG targets. This report provides an in-depth look at this increasingly important issue, including analysis of the initiatives attempting to make data centers more sustainable.