According to an inadequate energy source, the construction of new information centers in the U.K. and Europe is being delayed. Energy companies in the United States have been having trouble keeping up with demand.
David Sleath, chief executive of creation large Segro, said that he would ultimately become investing “hundreds of tens and more” into building fresh data centres, according to The Times. ” The second biggest requirement is access to power”, he told the publication.
Segro, which operates 35 U. K. information facilities, has had to wait” a number of years” for infrastructure improvements that increase hold power before breaking ground on a designed growth.
A state spokesman said efforts are being made to advance stalled jobs, while a National Grid spokesman said the company is” as quickly as possible” in a statement to The Times. The spokesperson added that the National Grid and Ofgem, an energy regulation, are working together to release the grid connections approach.
Electricity shortages: A major area of concern
Data center companies worldwide, including North America, are most concerned about energy shortages because they make it difficult to maintain power. According to a report from Bain and Company, U.S. utility companies would need to generate up to 26 % more energy than the total for 2023 to meet the demand forecast for 2028.
However, by 2030, the Electric Power Research Institute predicts that the U.S. data center electricity consumption will be more than twice as high.
Sleath continued, adding that the issue is still in its early stages in the United Kingdom but is growing as the government works to develop a” U.K. victory account” to make it more technologically advanced.
However, there is proof that the country’s technology sector is currently stagnating. Research has revealed that, this time, the number of software companies founded in the U. K. has suffered its second “marked reduction” since 2022. There were only 11, 368 innovative tech enterprises in the second quarter of 2024, compared with 13, 073 in the first third — an 11 % decline.
View: UK Government Announces £32m of AI Projects
UK deems information areas important, piling pressure on the Grid
Demand for data centers is rising rapidly around the world to support AI instruction and the rise of cloud storage services to support the models. In September, the government announced that data areas are now deemed essential national network.
As evidenced by July’s CrowdStrike failure, the government claimed that this change was intended to improve the security of the nation as they become more crucial to the smooth functioning of crucial services.
But, according to Ishmael Burdeau, a civil servant accountable for the government’s Net Zero strategy, it also means that planning regulations surrounding their growth have been relaxed, so more can be greenlit.
As per the The Register, he said the classification allows the state to “override native opposition to datacenters”, which is usually based on their power and water use, sound, and economic damage.
Four U.S. tech companies announced shortly after that they had committed to investing £6.3 billion in U.K. data centers, giving the nation” the necessary infrastructure to train and deploy the next generation of AI technologies.”
SEE: Microsoft Bets Big on UK AI with$ 3.2bn Investment
Power demands could scupper Europe’s environmental goals
Failure to meet the data center’s electricity needs could spell disaster for the environment. By the end of the decade, according to a Morgan Stanley report from September, 2.5 billion tons of carbon will be produced at the facilities, three times more than if the generative AI boom had never occurred.
SEE: Sending One Email Using ChatGPT is equivalent to consuming One Bottle of Water
Google revealed in July that the company would produce 14.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents in 2023 as a result of the expansion of its data centers to support AI developments. This marks a 48 % increase compared with the 2019 figure and a 13 % rise since 2022.
The E. U. has a goal of reducing the region’s 2030 greenhouse gas emissions to at least 11.7 % lower than what was projected in 2020, on top of becoming climate neutral by 2050. However, these targets may well be scuppered, a report published by McKinsey this week found that, by 2030, demand for bit barns in Europe will triple, increasing their share of the region’s total energy demand by 3 %.
Europe is also having trouble generating the electricity needed for data centers, just like the United Kingdom.
” These include limited sources of reliable power, sustainability concerns, insufficient upstream infrastructure for power access, land availability issues, shortages of power equipment used in data centers, and a lack of skilled electrical tradespeople for building facilities and infrastructure”, the McKinsey analysts wrote.
Data centers do n’t just need electricity to power servers; instead, significant energy is also spent on cooling systems to manage the heat produced by dense hardware. Due to their extreme processing power, AI chips generate even more heat, so designers have been requesting from equipment suppliers to lower the temperature of the cooling water.
The European Data Center Association’s chair, Michael Winterson, told CNBC this week that lowering water temperatures will “fundamentally drive us back to an unsustainable situation that we were in 25 years ago.”
