The energy appetite of big tech companies is practically visible from the east coast of Scotland. About 12 miles offshore is a wind farm, where each of the 60 giant turbines has blades about the size of an American football field. The utilities behind the Moray West project had fiance The site would be capable of generating enough electricity to power 1.3 million homes once completed. That was before Amazon intervened.
In January, Amazon Announced had reached a deal to claim more than half of the site’s 880 megawatts of production, part of its ongoing attempt to quench its insatiable thirst for energy. As the world’s largest companies rush to build the infrastructure needed to enable artificial intelligence, even remote Scottish wind farms are becoming indispensable.
In Europe last year, $79.4 million was spent on new data center projects, according to research firm Global Data. Already in 2024, there are signs that demand is accelerating. Microsoft today announced an investment of $3.2 billion. bet on data centers in Sweden. Earlier this year, the company also said it would double its data center infrastructure in Germany, while pledging a $4.3 billion investment in data centers for AI infrastructure in France. Amazon announced a network of data centers in the state of Brandenburg as part of an $8.5 billion investment investment in Germany, later dedicating himself other 17.1 billion dollars to Spain. Google said it would spend $1.1 billion in its data center in Finland to drive AI growth.
As tech giants rush to build more data centers, panic reigns behind the scenes about how to power them. microsoft, Goal and Google All plan to reach net zero emissions by 2030, while heavy logistics Amazon 2040 has been set as a goal. To achieve that goal, in the last decade these companies have sought renewable energy contracts with wind or solar companies. But all of these projects depend on electrical grids, which are collapsing in the face of growing demand for clean energy. This is forcing tech giants to think about their energy-intensive futures and consider how they might operate their own off-grid, off-system energy empires.
“There is a recognition that as energy demand increases, the industry will need to find alternative energy sources,” says Colm Shorten, senior director of data center strategy at real estate services company JLL, explaining that Servers are increasingly looking for “backups.” “the cable”, whether through gas or diesel generators or more innovative technologies such as green hydrogen.
Data centers need power for two main purposes. The first is to power the chips that allow computers to run algorithms or power video games. The second is to cool the servers, to prevent them from overheating and crashing. Initiatives such as using liquid to cool the chips instead of air are expected to generate modest energy savings. But forecasts still expect data center power demand to reach double by 2026according to the International Energy Association, thanks in part to the demands of artificial intelligence.
Over the past five years, technology companies have been on an increasingly frenetic buying spree for renewable contracts known as power purchase agreements (PPAs), which can allow data center operators to reserve power from a park wind or solar site even before the projects have been executed. built. In Denmark there are solar parks financed by Meta. In Norway there are wind farms financed by Google. As early adopters of such agreements, technology companies have helped boost Europe’s now thriving PPA market, says WindEurope spokesperson Christoph Zipf. This month, Microsoft hit the world’s largest company. renewable energy agreementsigning a $10 billion contract for clean energy in Europe and the United States.
However, renewables still need to circulate through the power grid, which is becoming a bottleneck, especially in Europe, as a wave of renewable energy producers try to come online to feed green transition demand. in a multitude of sectors. “We are going to encounter energy limitations,” Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta foretold in a podcast in April. At Davos this year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also warned that the status quo was not going to be able to give AI the power it needed to move forward. “There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough,” he said at a Bloomberg event.