Governments around the world are tightening regulations on data center construction due to concerns about their huge energy consumption and impact on national climate change goals and power grids.
by financial timesCountries such as China, Singapore, and Ireland have imposed restrictions on new data centers in recent years to comply with increasingly stringent environmental regulations.
Other measures in Germany and Loudoun County, Virginia include restricting permits for data centers in residential areas and requiring renewable energy to be fed into the grid and the waste heat generated to be reused. has been introduced.
Increasing demand for AI
The most serious threat to the new project lies in Ireland. Ireland’s low tax rates and easy access to high-capacity undersea cables for global internet traffic make it a hub for server farms built by cloud computing giants. Data center operators Vantage, EdgeConneX and Equinix were denied permission for new projects in Dublin last year due to the country’s energy and water regulator’s 2021 decision to restrict new data connections to the power grid.
The United States is home to one-third of the world’s 8,000 data centers, and its energy consumption is increasing significantly, due in no small part to the growing demand for AI. Technology companies like Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon are under increasing pressure to take a more active role in renewable energy generation and engage in energy efficiency measures to keep their data centers running.
As tech giants invest en masse in wind and solar energy, Microsoft is starting to consider nuclear options to fuel some of its data centers.
Analysts at Barclays warn that governments have not yet considered the impact of increased internet usage on power grids, predicting similar regulations will be introduced around the world in the coming years. .
This could put pressure on the $220 billion data center and cloud industry, which is expected to grow to $418 billion by the end of 2010 due to a surge in global data demand.
