IN THIS LESSON

What is the exact scale?

An average full-scale data center is roughly 100,000 square feet in size. While “hyper scale facilities,” or large-scale facilities used by big corporations, can exceed 1 million square feet, the typical enterprise data centers range from 20,000 to 100,000 square feet, and hosts approximately 2,000 to 5,000 servers.

These facilities increasingly require over 10 acres of land to accommodate power and cooling infrastructure.

Data Center Breakdown

The largest share of energy use in most data centers comes from IT equipment, including servers, storage, and networking systems. According to the International Energy Agency and analyses from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, IT equipment typically accounts for about 40 to 60 percent of total electricity use, and even more in highly optimized hyperscale facilities. These findings are also supported by work from Jonathan Koomey, who shows that computing load dominates overall consumption, especially as demand for cloud and AI services grows.

Cooling systems are the second largest energy consumer. According to the U.S. Department of Energy and technical guidance from ASHRAE, cooling can account for roughly 30 to 50 percent of total energy use, depending on the efficiency of the facility. These systems include air conditioning units, chillers, and airflow management. Smaller amounts of energy are lost in power infrastructure like UPS systems and transformers. According to both the DOE and industry data shared by companies such as Google, these losses usually represent about 5 to 15 percent of total energy. Together, these sources consistently show that IT equipment is the largest energy consumer, with cooling as the next major contributor.

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