“The UK just doesn't have many district heat networks. A lot of infrastructure is required that is done best as public infrastructure,” says Peter Judge, senior research analyst at Uptime Intelligence.
After completing a major upgrade to its New York metro platform to a quad-node network architecture, Internet Exchange (IX) operator DE-CIX has turned to a different deployment, working with NGO Internet Pour Tous, along with internet connectivity and web hosting provider United SA, to expand the Kinshasa-based Africa Congo Internet Exchange (ACIX) with an additional datacentre presence in OADC Texaf's Kinshasa FIH1 facility.
Datacentres are consuming 6% of electricity in the UK and US, with the growing strain of AI on energy supplies prompting community resistance, according to research. The proportion of electricity used by vast warehouses stacked with microchips to power AI and the internet has risen 15% worldwide in the past two years as annual global investment in datacentres approaches $1tn (740bn) nearly 1% of the global economy, according to the International Data Center Association (IDCA).
We are making sure that we have renewable energy powering all of our datacentre footprint. We have 100% renewable power today that is powering all of Azure, and we're very proud to build that base and essentially stimulate renewable energy around the world and in the UK.
An international research effort is mobilising to develop chips with the potential to reduce the energy consumption of artificial intelligence (AI) datacentres by using light instead of electricity to process information. The work is being pioneered by a team of scientists from Europe and South Korea, working together as the Haetae consortium, who have already received €1.49m in funding from the European Union (EU) to financially support their work.
The British government has conceded it should not have approved a campus near London's M25 orbital motorway and that the decision should be quashed, following a legal challenge by campaign group Foxglove. The non-profit filed its challenge last year after the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government overturned Buckinghamshire Council's rejection of the Woodlands Park site near Iver. The local authority had blocked the project on grounds it would significantly alter the area's character and appearance.
As Australia rides the AI boom with dozens of new investments in datacentres in Sydney and Melbourne, experts are warning about the impact these massive projects will have on already strained water resources. Water demand to service datacentres in Sydney alone is forecast to be larger than the volume of Canberra's total drinking water within the next decade. In Melbourne the Victorian government has announced a $5.5m investment to become Australia's datacentre capital,
Each day, Kiran Kasbe drives a rickshaw taxi through his home neighbourhood of Mahul on Mumbai's eastern seafront, down streets lined with stalls selling tomatoes, bottle gourds and auberginesand, frequently, through thick smog. Earlier this year, doctors found three tumours in his 54-year-old mother's brain. It's not clear exactly what caused her cancer. But people who live near coal plants are much more likely to develop the illness, studies show, and the residents of Mahul live a few hundred metres down the road from one.
Projections released by the IT analyst house suggest the electricity demands of datacentres will grow by 16% this year and are on course to double by 2030. At the same time, Gartner analysts estimate that the amount of electricity consumed by the global datacentre market will hit 448 terrawatt hours (TWh) in 2025, rising to 980 TWh by 2030, with much of this energy consumed by power-hungry AI workloads hosted in these datacentres.
Jensen Huang, the boss of the chipmaker Nvidia, had some advice for UK ministers last week as they signed a multibillion-pound tech deal with the US: burn more gas. I've every confidence that the UK will realise that it takes energy to grow new industries, he said. Sustainable power like nuclear and wind and of course all of that solar is all going to contribute. But I'm also hoping that gas turbines can also contribute.
The $30bn (22bn) sets out the company's UK budget over the next four years and refers not just to artificial intelligence infrastructure but also ongoing operations across the UK. Microsoft said the number included $15bn in capital expenditure such as on equipment, land and buildings for AI and cloud services, areas where datacentres are key components. The other half will go on day-to-day operations such as research, sales and product development.
Google has unveiled plans to invest an additional £5 billion in the UK over the next two years, in a move it says will help expand the country's artificial intelligence economy, create thousands of jobs and accelerate breakthroughs in science and technology. The announcement coincides with the state visit of US President Donald Trump, during which major technology and energy deals are expected to dominate the agenda. The investment will include significant spending on Google's infrastructure, research and engineering teams, as well as support for Google DeepMind, its London-based AI arm. The company said the expansion would generate 8,250 " new AI-driven jobs " in Britain.
A TechUK report that claimed datacentres in England use less water than previously thought has been accused of containing "methodological flaws" designed to appease tech lobbying in the UK. Foxglove, a non-profit organisation that campaigns for fairness in technology and the protection of local communities, described the study as "dodgy and misleading", arguing that its conclusions are not supported by the evidence.
As the backbone of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, cloud computing and the internet of things (IoT), datacentres are at the centre of modern business infrastructure, but as businesses become more dispersed, the infrastructure surrounding datacentres has become more critical and complex, with network outages no longer isolated events and their cost to businesses never higher, a study from Opengear has found.
