Big Tech’s big data-centre problem

In April, the Big Four tech firms – Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft – pledged to invest a combined $725 billion in AI infrastructure over the next year. The rosy global future these companies envision is fuelled by a never-ending expansion of data centres. These are massive banks of microchips which require vast energy sources to power them, and large reservoirs of water to cool them.

This wave of investment is already fuelling a huge data centre boom globally, notably in US states like Texas, which houses the Stargate data centre. Texas is a good site for such a facility, with its vast reserves of renewables and oil and gas. This will come in handy given that Stargate is anticipated to have operational needs of 10 gigawatts. For comparison, the UK’s much maligned and delayed nuclear-power stations, Sizewell C and Hinkley Point, are expected to have a combined output of 6.4 gigawatts.

The huge energy requirements of data centres are therefore likely to pose a significant challenge in the very near future. The challenge will be even greater in the UK, given that it routinely struggles to heat its homes in winter and now faces sky-high energy costs following the war in Iran.

Elon Musk has touted the idea of putting data centres in space, which means they could be solar-powered. He has an agreement with Google to develop a prototype scheduled for late 2027. It is a typically sci-fi move from Musk, and one wouldn’t want to bet against him making it work. But the obstacles are significant. It is unclear how data centres would cope with cosmic rays and the vacuum of space. This is still very much tomorrow’s solution while SpaceX grapples with the problem of launching this vast hardware into orbit.

A more immediate solution has been to situate data centres in the Gulf States. These energy-rich monarchies are thrilled by the possibilities of AI and don’t have any pesky electorates to answer to. There are, though, obvious drawbacks to locating facilities like these in the Arabian desert. They require gallons of water to keep them cool and they contain circuit boards that are highly sensitive to sand.

The Islamic Republic of Iran’s attack on commercial data-centre facilities in Bahrain and Abu Dhabi in early March may have further dampened enthusiasm for a Middle Eastern data-centre expansion. The attack left people in Dubai and Abu Dhabi unable to go about their daily lives. They couldn’t pay for taxis, order food deliveries, or check their bank balances. Iran had very effectively illustrated the vulnerabilities of the physical data centres underpinning cloud infrastructure – and the risks of placing more such centres in such a volatile region.

Where this all leaves us is uncertain. The infrastructure on which AI depends to power its expansion is increasingly in direct competition with humans for energy. It may be Luddite to suggest that energy and physical constraints, married to popular resentment, may place a brake on an AI future whose benefits its progenitors still struggle to articulate. Of course, a new large-scale energy source – be it nuclear fusion or space-sourced solar power or something else entirely – may emerge in the near future and render these concerns moot. But as it stands, the AI future is not looking as certain as it once did.

The vast AI-infrastructure spend tells us something else, too. The technological leaps in my lifetime, from EasyJet flights to iPhones, have rested on technology becoming cheaper, less intensive and more widely available. It’s why in the early 1990s The Simpsons joked: ‘Within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.’ It was a satirical nod to the increasing affordability of ever more sophisticated forms of technology. But it spoke to the optimism of the era, too, a time when the future benefits of computing technology seemed self-evident. Can the architects of AI really offer us the same?

It seems the supposed technology of the future is running up against the cultural and material limits of the present.

Henry Williams is a writer based in London.