A new player has entered the game 🎮 The AI boom has seen Kentucky earmarked for a big period of growth in the data center sector. The increase in demand for power is obviously a contentious topic but it is driving new markets to emerge in the US. Could we see Kentucky become the next hyperscale powerhouse for the likes of Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google? #datacenters #datacenterconstruction #hyperscale
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“Microsoft operates more than 300 data centers around the world, and in 2021 declared itself “on pace to build between 50 and 100 new datacenters each year for the foreseeable future.” The dual task of laying down those new facilities and making them sustainable has fallen to Noelle Walsh, the head of Microsoft’s data-center division." In the midst of unprecedented technological growth, we're seeing a story unfold that's filled with both encouraging progress on environmental sustainability and daunting challenges. While this articles narrative might lean towards the pessimistic side, it's important to shine a light on efforts like those of Microsoft who are delicately balancing the push for environmental betterment with the rapid expansion of digital services. Solving these challenges, at scale, with this exponential rate of growth, is an extrodinary challenge. The obstacles presented by the impending 10 - 100x growth in digital infrastructure are immense, but within them lies the seed for innovation and forward-thinking. It's a reminder that through collaboration with our partners and stakeholders in the industry, we have the capability to not just confront these environmental issues but also to lay the groundwork for a future that marries technological advancement with ecological stewardship. Some great perspectives from Noelle in this interview: "Walsh told me the company is moving aggressively to reach its end-of-the-decade environmental benchmarks. It’s partnering with power providers to bring more solar and wind energy online. It’s investing in fusion companies and researching new battery designs. It’s working across water-stressed regions, including Arizona, to put water back into local lakes and rivers. “Even with our surge in demand and surge in AI,” she said, “our 2025 goals have stayed the same, and so have our 2030 goals.” “But all of this work takes time—including years of consultation with local authorities, power providers, and communities, as well as risky, long-term bets on basic research. In comparison, the AI explosion happened overnight. On an earnings call last summer, Microsoft told investors that the Azure OpenAI Service was bringing in new customers at a rate of nearly 100 a day.” “AI didn’t create these problems, but it’s certainly making them worse. According to Walsh, AI applications are among the most computationally intensive that Azure supports, which creates a need for more data centers overall while also upping the energy and cooling demands at each one. On top of that, generative-AI applications in particular can be orders of magnitude more energy-intensive than the predictive-AI applications that came before. “We still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in January at Davos. “There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough.” #ai #water #digitalinfrastructure #thepursuitofexxellence #sustainability
AI Is Taking Water From the Desert
theatlantic.com
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Editorial Expert (Content Manager and Creative Lead) with 10 years of experience in Geek Culture, Gaming, and Tech | Copy and UX Writer | Geek Storyteller
The 'cloud' is nothing but a clever marketing scheme. There is no 'cloud'. Just gazillions of data centers, polluting the skies, consuming too much energy, and guzzling billions of gallons of water every year. No amount of holiday selfies is worth the amount of environmental damage these beasts inflict. No amount of bingable shows can mitigate the damage on local communities. Do your research (but use a regular privacy-focused green search engine like DuckDuckGo or Ecosia instead of AI).
How many data centers fit in a US state? Virginia has the largest concentration of data centers anywhere in the world (more than 300) that come with a huge increase in demand for energy upgrades, extensive acreage, and lots of water to operate. These centers are now consuming energy equivalent to thousands of households, and it's spiking Virginia's energy usage alarmingly. 📈 Data centers enable our binge-watching, cloud storage, and AI advancements. But at what cost? At Hive, we're confronting this challenge head-on and in the simplest way: we don't use data centers. This is how: https://lnkd.in/eHC_d5Kn A sustainable digital world needs a sustainable cloud. 🌿🌐 #HiveGreenTech #SustainableData #EnergyEfficiency
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The surge in artificial intelligence is driving the growth of data centers in unexpected locations, including Kentucky. The state's largest utility and legislature are working to attract major investments from tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, which could lead to billions in economic development. Kentucky's new tax incentives, outlined in House Bill 8, aim to capitalize on this trend by offering significant tax breaks for substantial data center investments. 🔗 Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gw_-HfNQ #datacenter #datacenterconstruction #kentucky #growth #economyboom #tech #taxincentives
Driving surge in demand for power, data centers eye Kentucky • Kentucky Lantern
https://kentuckylantern.com
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..."Microsoft bought 279 acres for this location... the plot holds two finished buildings...and seven more are on the way. Each will be decked out with rows of servers and computers that must be kept below a certain temperature. The complex has been designated partly for OpenAI’s use, according to a person familiar with the plan. (Both Microsoft and OpenAI declined to comment on this assertion.) And Microsoft plans to absorb its excess heat with a steady flow of air and, as needed, evaporated drinking water. Use of the latter is projected to reach more than 50 million gallons every year...there were dozens of other facilities I could visit in the area, including those run by Apple, Amazon, Meta, and, soon, Google. Not too far from California, and with plenty of cheap land, Greater Phoenix is among the fastest-growing hubs in the U.S. for data centers… Researchers at UC Riverside estimated last year, for example, that global AI demand could cause data centers to suck up 1.1 trillion to 1.7 trillion gallons of fresh water by 2027. A separate study from a university in the Netherlands, this one peer-reviewed, found that AI servers’ electricity demand could grow, over the same period, to be on the order of 100 terawatt hours per year, about as much as the entire annual consumption of Argentina or Sweden. Noelle Walsh, the head of Microsoft’s data-center division said "The company is transitioning some data centers, including those in Arizona, to designs that use less or no water, cooling themselves instead with giant fans. Her team is also working with steel and concrete suppliers to make the building materials for each data center more sustainable, and she’d like to see server components recycled whenever possible... In the meantime, though, Microsoft has been reluctant to provide customers with specific details on the environmental impacts of their cloud-service needs."
AI Is Taking Water From the Desert
theatlantic.com
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Underwater data centers are significant for their potential in reducing environmental impact, improving performance, and enhancing security. Despite challenges, their sustainable and efficient power usage makes them an attractive option for organizations aiming to minimize their carbon footprint.
Director Field Intelligence Element, National Security Sciences Directorate, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
'Microsoft has quietly discontinued its Project Natick underwater data center (UDC) experiment, which began in 2013. The company confirmed the news with DatacenterDynamics, with Head of Microsoft’s Cloud Operations + Innovation Noelle Walsh saying, “I’m not building subsea data centers anywhere in the world.” She later added, “My team worked on it, and it worked. We learned a lot about operations below sea level and vibration and impacts on the server. So, we’ll apply those learning to other cases.”' ... 'While Microsoft has concluded its undersea data center research, China just began its submerged server project in 2023, lowering 68,000 square meters of servers on the southern coast of Hainan. On the other hand, Microsoft did not indicate whether it would start another UDC project in the future.' https://lnkd.in/g2KWFYhQ
Microsoft shelves its underwater data center — Project Natick had fewer server failures compared to servers on land
tomshardware.com
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On a Mission Building Next Gen Digital Infrastructure | AI Data Centers | AI Compute | GPU Cloud | AI Cloud Infrastructure Engineering Leader | Hyperscalers| Cloud,AI/HPC Infra Solutions | Sustainability | 9.6K Linkedin
Unpacking Google’s data center leap with Arm-based Axion processors,by Victor Dabrinze,Siliconangle. The “data-first company” buzzword is mainstream today, but back when it wasn’t, Google LLC had already embraced the ideology. Now, drawing from years of combined hardware and software experience handling swathes of data, Axion processors have been engineered by Google to bring cutting-edge artificial intelligence capabilities to the data center. “Google has a rich history of custom silicon and systems development for specific workloads,” said Mark Lohmeyer (pictured, right), vice president and general manager of compute and machine learning infrastructure at Google Cloud. “Five generations of TPUs, three generations of video coding units and multiple generations of processors that go into Pixel phones. We were excited to apply that engineering prowess to, in many ways, a bigger space and a bigger problem, which is general-purpose data center computing.”
Google's Arm-based Axion data center processors in detail - SiliconANGLE
siliconangle.com
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Data and Analytics Specialist/ eDiscovery Platform Expert/ Digital Forensics/Data and IT Infrastructure/ESI Sherpa/ Bellwether
The real question is were there fewer failures because they were built better originally because of no access. They are comparing to regular land ones not similar ones built at the same time (aka a control group) Talk about taking the science out of computer science!
Director Field Intelligence Element, National Security Sciences Directorate, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
'Microsoft has quietly discontinued its Project Natick underwater data center (UDC) experiment, which began in 2013. The company confirmed the news with DatacenterDynamics, with Head of Microsoft’s Cloud Operations + Innovation Noelle Walsh saying, “I’m not building subsea data centers anywhere in the world.” She later added, “My team worked on it, and it worked. We learned a lot about operations below sea level and vibration and impacts on the server. So, we’ll apply those learning to other cases.”' ... 'While Microsoft has concluded its undersea data center research, China just began its submerged server project in 2023, lowering 68,000 square meters of servers on the southern coast of Hainan. On the other hand, Microsoft did not indicate whether it would start another UDC project in the future.' https://lnkd.in/g2KWFYhQ
Microsoft shelves its underwater data center — Project Natick had fewer server failures compared to servers on land
tomshardware.com
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We published a must-read story by Karen Hao at The Atlantic today on the resources demanded by just one datacenter in Goodyear, Arizona—millions upon millions of gallons of water every year to support AI. Perhaps more importantly, the story also reveals how Microsoft withheld information about the projected growth of AI’s energy costs. And it contains the important perspective from Dr. Sasha Luccioni that while some AI models are associated with the potential to reduce emissions, no such use case has been significantly demonstrated by generative AI, the technology fueling the current boom. “I’d traveled out to Arizona to see it for myself. The Goodyear site stretched along the road farther than my eyes could see. A black fence and tufts of desert plants lined its perimeter. I began to walk its length, clutching my phone and two bottles of water. According to city documents, Microsoft bought 279 acres for this location. For now, the plot holds two finished buildings, thick and squat, with vents and pipes visible along their sides. A third building is under construction, and seven more are on the way. Each will be decked out with rows of servers and computers that must be kept below a certain temperature. The complex has been designated partly for OpenAI’s use, according to a person familiar with the plan. (Both Microsoft and OpenAI declined to comment on this assertion.) And Microsoft plans to absorb its excess heat with a steady flow of air and, as needed, evaporated drinking water. Use of the latter is projected to reach more than 50 million gallons every year. “That might be a burden in the best of times. As of 2023, it seemed absurd. Phoenix had just endured its hottest summer ever, with 55 days of temperatures above 110 degrees. The weather strained electrical grids and compounded the effects of the worst drought the region has faced in more than a millennium. The Colorado River, which provides drinking water and hydropower throughout the region, has been dwindling. Farmers have already had to fallow fields, and a community on the eastern outskirts of Phoenix went without tap water for most of the year.” https://lnkd.in/eQw7nxXf
AI Is Taking Water From the Arizona Desert
theatlantic.com
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#LinkedInLive last call 📞 With the U.S. #DataCenter market size estimated to approach $100 billion by 2027, the industry has increasing #Infrastructure demands and challenges to overcome. Join Black & Veatch experts as they break down how to implement timely and resilient access to #EnergySolutions for your DC. Register before it's too late! ⏰⬇
Future-Ready Data Centers When Power is an Obstacle | LinkedIn
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Booming demand for artificial intelligence is encouraging Big Tech companies and their suppliers to explore converting old power stations and industrial sites into data centres. Microsoft, Google and Amazon are pouring billions of dollars into building data centres to power cloud computing and AI services, but it has become increasingly challenging to find suitable locations with sufficient power for the energy-hungry facilities. Many data centre markets are “heavily constrained when it comes to land availability and power”, which in turn fuelled interest in smaller markets and “more complicated sites” such as old power stations, said Adam Cookson, head of land transactions for real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield’s EMEA data centre advisory group.
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Director, Global Service Delivery | Data Center Scale & Network Infrastructure Expert
2moI agree with you Alex Theakston, because recent Kentucky state's legislative moves, which includes tax breaks for data center construction, are clearly aiming to attract investments and address the increasing demand for power, despite the environmental challenges it presents.