From Bloomberg via The Japan Times, August 6:
Artificial intelligence’s tremendous hunger for electricity is already well known. What’s less familiar is how the rapid fluctuations in data centers’ appetites can break essential equipment at the facilities.
Batteries, generators, cooling units and other critical systems are put under such strain at AI computing facilities that they are malfunctioning or prematurely reaching the end of their lives.
As the AI boom accelerates, these technical problems suggest added costs and unforeseen reliability problems, with even a few minutes of lost uptime hitting data-center developers’ revenue. They come at a time when investors and lenders are already jittery about hyperscalers’ hundreds of billions of dollars of spending, amid growing concerns that these facilities could be depreciating much faster than estimated.
The problems are also a potential source of wider instability in power grids that are already straining to keep the lights on.
“AI does create very unusual power demand,” said Amber Villegas-Williamson, principal consultant at the Uptime Institute in the U.K., which advises electricity suppliers and data centers on standards and reliability. “It’s like over-revving your car wears out the engine faster than keeping a constant speed.”
Data centers have been around for decades, gulping down electricity while they ensure that everything from your favorite streaming show to your online grocery order functions smoothly. But facilities designed for AI computing are different because their demand is so large and swings much more dramatically.
Power increments equivalent to the consumption of factories, towns or even cities can appear and disappear within seconds, creating repeated shocks that connected equipment struggles to absorb.
A gigawatt data center is equivalent to a city the size of Boston, half of which can flicker on and off every few seconds, said Shannon Miller, founder and president of Mainspring Energy, which works on micro-grid projects for industrial and data-center customers. Some AI campuses planned in Texas and the U.S. Midwest are more than five times bigger, consuming nearly as much power on average as New York City.
AI data centers put particular strain on their power supply when they are training new models — a process that mobilizes all of the graphics processing units (GPUs) in unison. Like the digital equivalent of bees swarming or a school of fish changing direction, hundreds of thousands of GPUs can power up and down on a millisecond basis.
AI at times sees power usage spike as much as 50% above its design capacity, “so a 1 gigawatt facility may use 1.5 gigawatts for a split second,” said Drew Baglino, a former Tesla executive who started Heron Power Electronics. The company is developing equipment to manage power fluctuations for Nvidia’s even more energy intensive next-generation of servers, due in 2027....
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Also at The Japan Times, August 6:
North Korea marks Hiroshima atomic bombing anniversary with missile test
