ECO CHAMBER

DATA CENTRES ARE A VERY VITAL PART OF THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION THAT IS UNDERWAY, BUT THERE'S A PROBLEM: THEY CONSUME TOO MUCH ENERGY. AS DEMAND FOR SUCH CENTRES INCREASES IN INDIA, IT HAS NO OPTION BUT TO EMBRACE GREEN SOLUTIONS

- NIDHI SINGAL

ROW AFTER ROW of racks stacked with computer hardware like servers and data storage devices packed into a large, air-conditioned hall. These data centres are the organs that run the networks that power everything from sending a WhatsApp message to initiating online payments to streaming sports matches. They store, process, and manage large amounts of data.

And they’ve seen massive interest in recent years because of the breakneck speed of technological advances, particularly Generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI), which requires much higher amounts of computational power. That has sparked a global race to build more data centres. And in India, too, data centres are being built at a frenetic pace.

“The average size of the data centres increased from the 20–30 MW range to 50–100 MW. And data centres that are able to support the high power requirement of AI are being built now,” says Vivek Dahiya, Managing Director and Head of the Data Centre Advisory Team, Asia Pacific at Cushman & Wakefield, the global commercial real estate services firm. He adds that the demand for data centres will double globally, driven by AI.

But there’s a catch here. These data centres consume massive amounts of electricity.

Data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) bears this out. In 2022, data centres consumed 460 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity, or 2% of all global electricity usage. That is expected to double now, thanks to the increasing adoption of large language models (LLMs) for AI. The result is a likely increase in emissions from data centres that contribute around 2.5–3.7% of all global emissions, according to carbon intelligence start-up Climatic.