Janus: 2010s flat data center power was driven by cloud migration, not efficiency
Brian Janous · Energy is now the ‘primary bottleneck’ for AI · May 21, 2024 · at 10:15
Brian Janus, former energy procurement lead at Microsoft and co-founder of Cloverleaf Infrastructure, explains why aggregate data center power demand appeared flat between 2010 and 2020 despite massive computing growth.
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“What was happening is you had a lot of businesses shutting down their own very inefficient data centers that were using multiples of the amount of electricity that a hyperscale data center would use. And the hyperscale data center could absorb that with significantly less electricity consumption. For more computation, right? So you had a significant increase in computation over that period of time with almost no increase in electricity, but a lot of people attribute that to efficiencies. Well, data centers are just getting more efficient, but really it was happening. We're just moving environments.”
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