There have been numerous articles recently about the environmental and economic consequences of the electricity we are using today to power our increasing use of computers, phones, gaming platforms etc. More recently people have been writing about how the accelerated use of AI will accelerate the demand for electricity and the associated impact on the environment.1
At the same time, some studies claim that there are enough data centers to handle increasing loads, concluding that many data centers are operating at less than 30% capacity (though the data here is sparse). What we do know is that when a data center is operating at a low level the whole building still needs to be cooled and most of the equipment is still running and when we consider just storage – there is little difference in energy use if it is operating at a low level or near capacity.
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