SERVERS at Google and other computing behemoths are guzzling an increasing proportion of the world’s electricity, according to calculations by Jonathan Koomey of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.
Koomey reckons these firms’ data centres already consume 1 per cent of it, and their appetite is growing at 17 per cent per year. At this rate, server farms will consume nearly five times as much electricity a decade from now.
More optimistically, Koomey says their growth will slow a little as companies raise efficiency to reduce the need for costly new data centres. Some centres now run their servers at only 5 to 10 per cent of full capacity, and up to 30 per cent of servers are running but doing nothing (Environmental Research Letters, ).
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