Feed: Slashdot
Feed Link: https://slashdot.org/
---

Title: Google's Data Center Energy Use Doubled In 4 Years

Link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/07/01/...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: No wonder Google is
desperate for more power: The company's data centers more than doubled their
electricity use in just four years. The eye-popping stat comes from Google's
most recent sustainability report, which it released late last week. In 2024,
Google data centers used 30.8 million megawatt-hours of electricity. That's
up from 14.4 million megawatt-hours in 2020, the earliest year Google broke
out data center consumption. Google has pledged to use only carbon-free
sources of electricity to power its operations, a task made more challenging
by its breakneck pace of data center growth. And the company's electricity
woes are almost entirely a data center problem. In 2024, data centers
accounted for 95.8% of the entire company's electron budget. The company's
ratio of data-center-to-everything-else has been remarkably consistent over
the last four years. Though 2020 is the earliest year Google has made data
center electricity consumption figures available, it's possible to use that
ratio to extrapolate back in time. Some quick math reveals that Google's data
centers likely used just over 4 million megawatt-hours of electricity in
2014. That's sevenfold growth in just a decade. The tech company has already
picked most of the low-hanging fruit by improving the efficiency of its data
centers. Those efforts have paid off, and the company is frequently lauded
for being at the leading edge. But as the company's power usage effectiveness
(PUE) has approached the theoretical ideal of 1.0, progress has slowed. Last
year, Google's company-wide PUE dropped to 1.09, a 0.01 improvement over 2023
but only 0.02 better than a decade ago. Yesterday, Google announced a deal to
purchase 200 megawatts of future fusion energy from Commonwealth Fusion
Systems, despite the energy source not yet existing. "It's a sign of how
hungry big tech companies are for a virtually unlimited source of clean power
that is still years away," reports CNN.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

---
VRSS v2.1.180528