If a data center is moving in next door, you probably live in the United States. More than half of all upcoming global data centers—as indicated by land purchased for data centers not yet announced, those under construction, and those whose plans are public—will be developed in the United States.
And these figures are likely underselling the near-term data-center dominance of the United States. Power usage varies widely among data centers, depending on land availability and whether the facility will provide xhttps://spectrum.ieee.org/data-center-liquid-cooling or mixed-use services, says Tom Wilson, who studies energy systems at the Electric Power Research Institute. Because of these factors, “data centers in the U.S. are much larger on average than data centers in other countries,” he says.
Wilson adds that the dataset you see here—which comes from the analysis firm Data Center Map—may undercount new Chinese data centers because they are often not announced publicly. Chinese data-center plans are “just not in the repository of information used to collect data on other parts of the world,” he says. If information about China were up-to-date, he would still expect to see “the U.S. ahead, China somewhat behind, and then the rest of the world trailing.”
One thing that worries Wilson is whether the U.S. power grid can meet the rising energy demands of these data centers. “We’ve had flat demand for basically two decades, and now we want to grow. It’s a big system to grow,” he notes.
He thinks the best solution is asking data centers to be more flexible in their power use, maybe by scheduling complex computation for off-peak times or maintaining on-site batteries, removing part of the burden from the power grid. Whether such measures will be enough to keep up with demand remains an open question.
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