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Power-hungry data centres scrambling to find enough electricity to meet demand (www.abc.net.au)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Morgan Stanley estimates that data centres are currently using 5 per cent (1,050 MW) of the electricity on Australia's power grid and that is expected to grow to 8 per cent (2,500 MW) by 2030.

Some estimates even suggest they could require up to 15 per cent of the power on the grid by then.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I have a hard time taking this seriously. Data centers are far more power efficient than what we had previously (every medium sized business having a server room). And servers in general are far more power efficient than they were even a decade ago. We can fit so much more on a single server than we ever used to be able to.

Not that you would do it in 2024, but I could happily run a large business of 1,000+ users, including their public web presence out of about 10RU. Which translates to roughly a quarter of a server rack.

But why would you do that? Then you need to worry about cooling, power, redundant power, multiple Internet links, UPS and generator backup. Suddenly 10RU is a whole rack and more. Now, you need hardware contracts, people on call 24x7 and all sorts of overheads. Then there's stress testing on that infrastructure (eg simulating a power outage and making sure your UPS and generator carry the load). And I haven't even touched on multiple sites for redundancy.

It's far more efficient to host that in a data centre and let them worry about all that stuff.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I think they are more efficient than years ago yes, but some chips are consuming more power overall too. Yes what took up 40u a while ago can now fit in 10u but data centers aren't reducing in size, they'll just fill that 40 with more hardware

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

They need to fill that 40RU with more hardware to keep up with ever growing data creation demand. Think how much data your home produced a decade ago compared to now. Everything has some sort of sensor inside now recording data.