Data centers are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you wouldn’t be reading this blog post, placing that online order, or streaming your favorite show without them. On the other hand, nobody wants them in their neighborhood. Here in Central Ohio, my community apps (Nextdoor, etc) light up regularly with heated discussions titled, “NO DATA CENTER!” We have a lot of them already operating, and more in the construction phase. They’re massive and ugly, but that’s not the biggest problem. The real problem is energy consumption.
Remember Doc Brown in “Back to the Future”? When Marty McFly found himself stuck in 1955, Doc needed to find 1.21 gigawatts to feed into the flux capacitor in order to get Marty back to 1985. The amount of power needed was almost incomprehensible, and as Doc told Marty, only a bolt of lightning could supply that much power.
Note: A bolt of lightning only supplies that much power for a fraction of a second. Data centers require continuous supplies of energy. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I was curious how 1.21 GW compares to the current demands of data centers around the world. Therefore, I – obviously and ironically – consulted a chatbot. Google Gemini went into too much detail to quote verbatim, so I’ll summarize, but first, a physics lesson, because we need to make a distinction between power and energy.
POWER is a measure of capacity – the maximum power a data center can draw at any given moment in time – and it tells you how quickly a data center can use up available energy.
ENERGY is the fuel needed to operate the data center – usually in the form of electricity.
- Energy = how much fuel you have
- Power = how quickly you burn through that fuel
This brings us back to our bolt of lightning, which supplied 1.21 GW of power for a fraction of a second (typically, one millisecond). By comparison, data centers consume energy continuously – every second of every minute of every day.
Nerdy Math: Energy(lightning) = 1.21 GW x 1 ms = 336 Watt-hours
Gemini concludes that Doc’s bolt of lightning might run a single standard data center server rack for a few minutes.
We could also compare that bolt of lightning in terms of power. 1.21 gigawatts is 1,210 megawatts. Gemini explained it like this (and this next part is a verbatim excerpt):
Single Mega-Data Centers: A massive modern data center campus (like those operated by Amazon, Microsoft, or Google in Northern Virginia) can scale anywhere from 100 MW to 500 MW. Therefore, just two to three large data center campuses running at full capacity draw enough continuous power to match Doc’s lightning strike.
Global Data Center Consumption: As of recent estimates, global data center power demand is roughly 50 to 80 GW. That means at any given second, the world’s data centers are pulling enough power to send the DeLorean through time 40 to 65 times over simultaneously.
If you’re curious, I asked Gemini, “How much power did it take you to generate that answer?” Gemini replied, “To generate that exact answer for you, it took about 0.24 watt-hours (Wh) of electricity.”
So, there you have it, Doc. In conclusion, data centers consume a lot of energy.
Powerfully,
Michelle