Data increasing energy bills!

71 TWh of extra electricity required just to power future data centres

This intriguing BBC News article highlights concerns about rising energy bills due to the construction of power-hungry data centres, adding up to 71 TWh of electricity demand!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyr9nx0jrzo

New data centres are being built, while existing ones, that are just a few years old, now have costly but empty floorspace. This is partly due to power restrictions imposed by local electricity boards, which limit the power available for older data centres to deploy more compute in the vacated shelves of older equipment.

These not-so-old data centres may quickly become obsolete.

Yet, there might be a surprisingly simple and quite obvious solution to reuse that empty floor space: data storage! Specifically, cold data storage. With all the focus on AI and computation, many in the industry are not considering data and how it should be correctly stored, even though data and vast amounts of it are critical for LLMs.

Once data is created, it is quickly moved to storage - something most people are familiar with from their home computers. Similarly, when data is stored in the cloud, it is staged on different tiers or classes of storage devices depending on its age. Unfortunately, some cloud-based services and applications only consider the 'hot' storage tiers. We are now running out of power to support the unnecessary demands of these services. Added to that, the storage technologies available today won’t be able to keep up with the data demands of the next couple of years. New technologies like HoloMem are coming online, but they will be of no use if data is not directed to them.

It is time for more developers to adopt cold storage, so that 71 TWh of electricity is not wasted spinning hard disks or cooling them.

By utilising cold storage services such as Cloud Cold Storage, slightly older data can be stored efficiently in the cloud. This service uses 97% less electricity than storing data on hard disks and restores data quicker than hyperscaler archive offerings without the retrieval and egress fees.

As more applications and online services understand data lifecycle and adopt storage specifically designed for cold data, then the technology used for storing it can reside in the expensive but empty floors of power-restricted data centres, requiring minimal energy.

If you are engineering data, you can start using CloudColdStorage for free today without entering credit card details and with no tie-ins.

Cool your data, use less power.