AI services consume energy – how can the industry drive sustainability

Since the end of 2022, when ChatGPT was launched on a broad front, the range of AI applications has grown explosively. Not only have the services become more numerous, but they have also become better and can be used for increasingly complex challenges.

At the same time, there is increasing pressure on the availability of computing power in data centres, which require large amounts of energy and water to operate and cool.

In the EU, data centres account for around 3% of total electricity consumption. This amount of electricity could meet the needs of around 4 million households - and the use of data centres is expected to grow.

Interacting with 20 data centres every day

"In today's world, we are completely dependent on well-functioning digital infrastructures in our daily lives," says Tor Björn Minde, Head of Unit at ICE Datacenter, a test and demonstration facility for digitalisation and IT infrastructure at RISE.

"The average user probably touches at least 20 data centres a day without thinking about it. The whole of society is based on it," he says.

But major efforts are underway to tackle resource utilisation

"The data centre industry has a strong focus on energy efficiency. Power consumption is a significant part of a company's environmental impact, and efficiency work is therefore included in many companies' sustainability plans - simply because it is one of the best ways they can contribute to a better environment, climate and society as a whole. But also because energy costs are a large part of their expenses," says Minde.

Another driver for reducing resource use is branding, as a strong sustainability profile has become something that can attract both new talent and investors.

More effective AI training

The use of AI services is one of the reasons why the demand for high-performance data centres has grown particularly rapidly. However, the AI industry is optimising its solutions in a number of ways to reduce energy consumption.

"For example, they are currently improving and streamlining the methods for training AI models," says Tor Björn Minde.

He also explains that the actual application, called inference in computer language, will become more resource-efficient as the algorithms and underlying software are developed.

"Similar work is being done on the hardware in data centres, including making energy-intensive graphics processors and other components more efficient."

Heat is wasted

An important aspect of this is the amount of heat that is wasted. Today, up to 99.97% of the energy that goes into a data centre becomes heat.

"It's like traditional incandescent light bulbs that you would turn on to light up the room - and they would give off a lot of heat. Now they have been banned," says Tor Björn Minde.

Developments in computer components are likely to improve the relationship between computing power and heat, but in the meantime we have to manage the current situation.

"Here in the Nordic region we use a lot of district heating, which we can recycle by installing heat pumps. But this is not an interesting solution globally, as many places have no need for heating."

Can help grow plants... and mealworms

As a result, a lot of research is being done on heat recovery in various places around the world.
One example of new solutions being tested here in Sweden is to use the heat to grow different crops. This can be done, for example, by growing crops in greenhouses or by breeding mealworms.

"The mealworms can be used as chicken feed and replace some of the soya products that have a negative environmental impact in some places. It has been shown that it is possible to double the breeding rate of mealworms by adding heat, for example from data centres."

RISE is working with businesses and public sector organisations to find other solutions. At the ICE Datacenter test and demonstration facility, companies and organisations can optimise their technical infrastructure to maximise efficiency and profitability.

Among other things, RISE has undertaken a project to install fuel cells in data centres.

"We use the heat from the data centre to produce electricity and high-temperature heat, which can then be used in industrial processes, for example. What you need is gas, and in our project we only had access to biogas. The next step could be to use green hydrogen, which is gas produced with electricity from renewable sources such as solar and wind," says Minde.