IN THIS LESSON

Electricity Consumption

  1. Modern data centers are extremely electricity-intensive. Facilities range from small enterprise installations of a few megawatts to hyperscale campuses exceeding 100 MW of power capacity.

    Globally, data centers consumed about 240–340 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2022, representing roughly 1 to 1.3 percent of global electricity demand. Despite enormous growth in digital services, efficiency improvements have kept energy demand from growing as fast as computing activity. (International Energy Agency 2023).

    However, the rise of large AI training clusters is expected to increase electricity demand significantly during the 2020s.

Water Consumption

Data centers consume water primarily for cooling the heat generated by servers and other computing equipment. Many facilities use evaporative cooling to remove heat from air.

Water use is typically measured using Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE), which expresses how many liters of water are consumed per kilowatt-hour of electricity used by the IT equipment. In many facilities, this ranges roughly from 1 to 5 liters of water per kWh, depending on the cooling technology and climate conditions. For a large data center using around 100 gigawatt-hours of electricity annually, this can translate to tens or hundreds of millions of liters of water per year.

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