journey to the centre of our universe
News that planning permission has been granted for a massive £10bn data centre development on the site of the failed BritishVolt giga factory in the frozen north, further indicates that these businesses are central to modern life but at what cost?
Data centres are the backbone to today’s existence and power the universal internet. They store, process, send and receive the data we produce and use. The modern world could not function without them and each new IT development, such as the growth of social media, TV and music streaming, online gaming, banking and cloud computing, has further cemented our dependence upon them. Even your intrusive Ring doorbell and app-controlled Hive boiler are connected to one.
However, the single biggest anticipated surge in data centre development and hence, electricity use, is the rise of artificial intelligence. Generative AI systems are trained on extremely large stores of data, using ultra-powerful GPU microchips, which in turn consume vast amounts of power. Each and every time an AI system is activated, to answer a question (however banal) or generate an image (however tawdry), it trawls through its massive dataset to search for the solution. It has been estimated that Google’s new AI search facility uses in excess of ten times as much energy as a traditional keyword search.
Data centres exist all over the world but proliferate in North America, Europe and Southeast Asia. Somewhere close to five hundred are in Britain, predominantly clustered just outside large cities – close enough to facilitate high-speed online traffic from urban hotspots but far enough away to take advantage of cheaper land prices. Europe’s largest collection of data centres, 34 according to recent estimates, is at Slough’s infamous trading estate, where Betjeman’s friendly bombs failed to prevent it from becoming one of the largest data hubs in the Western world.
Ireland has long been a low-tax choice for tech firms and eight of the top ten global IT companies have a significant presence there. Numbering over eighty, their data centres already account for almost a quarter of the country’s energy use, which, according to the IEA, is set to rise to a third over the next two years. Consequently, and after a series of blackout warnings, a de facto moratorium on further development has been in place within Dublin. Notwithstanding the obvious contribution to the Irish economy – in the region of #7bn – they provide surprisingly few jobs: only 16,000 in a country and 5.3 million people.
Along with their impediment towards meeting any tangible carbon emission targets, the question of how to maintain national grid infrastructure when demand is rising at an unprecedented and unsustainable pace remains a genuine concern, not only for Ireland but the whole world.
