Every digital service we use today relies on a data centre somewhere, with more than 10,000 centres worldwide. The industry has been going through a boom over the last year and now data centres require more electricity, and store more valuable data, than they ever have. That burden is only going to increase with time, so now tech leaders are pursuing ways to future-proof the world’s energy grids.
How Data Centres Are Used
Data centres are used for a variety of things, all of them related to digital business. For example, most websites are hosted on a rented or privately owned server, housed in a data centre. They store the site and all its data, and then users access it without needing to process as much data on their own computers.
This is how most digital services find their way to your screen, from content management systems for work to libraries of TV shows from streaming platforms. In the UK and Ireland, popular iGaming sites use various servers to host casino game data for users. Then, for instance, when they load up bingo at Paddy Power, the game’s code, visual assets and other critical data will be sent from the nearest viable data centre. Since digital entities like iGaming platforms tend to process large volumes of data, such centres provide essential infrastructure to host this information. Â
Before the 2020s data centre boom, data centres were mainly used as part of content delivery networks, or CDNs. When a site has too many visitors, the host server can and will crash trying to process every user’s request. To spread the burden, and provide faster load times for users, host servers share data with centres across the planet. So, if a European user tries accessing an American site, the browser will connect to a closer server instead. For a more detailed breakdown, AWS explains CDNs here.
The Data Centre Boom
Once you understand how data centres are used, it’s easy to see how the industry is growing fast. More websites are launched every day, and they need to be stored somewhere. However, the real data centre boom started in 2023. That’s because it was part of an even larger phenomenon – the generative AI boom that followed OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT.
AI models need to crunch a lot of data to become as smart as they are. They also get smarter on the job, so their data stash grows over time. With no end in sight, there are concerns over how much energy the data centre industry will require in the future. Researchers from University College Cork have been tracking Ireland’s own use of data centres, which have been consuming 20% more electricity year over year.
Dr Paul Deane of UCC’s @MaREIcentre appeared on @RTENewsAtOne today to discuss the latest CSO data on electricity consumption, which reports that electricity consumption by data centres increased by 20% between 2022 and last yearhttps://t.co/8KLaH9eksG
— UCC Ireland (@UCC) July 23, 2024
Powering Data Centres in the Future
To keep up with data centre demand, one of two things needs to happen. Countries need to generate more power or find a more energy-efficient way to store data. Fortunately, there are solutions in development for both of them.
For power generation, small modular reactors (SMRs) may be the future. These are relatively new nuclear generators that are much smaller and produce a lot of clean energy, so they sidestep the traditional concerns about nuclear power. The world’s largest data centre operators – Amazon, Google and Microsoft – have announced SMR acquisition to power their data centres now and for the foreseeable future.
For data efficiency, 2024 has yielded several breakthroughs in fields like quantum memory storage or even diamond-based storage. These are promising because, if made viable, they could replace the traditional HDDs and SSDs that decorate server racks across the world. Diamond optical disks, described here by Pop Sci, could store 100 terabytes per disk and potentially free up a lot of energy on the grid.
Those are just some of the solutions being explored and, if any of them bear fruit, data centres will become a much smaller imposition on the growing tech economies of the world.
