The increasing electricity consumption by tech companies for AI training poses risks to global power supply stability, according to Hitachi Energy CEO Andreas Schierenbeck.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Schierenbeck emphasised the need for government intervention to regulate the volatile power usage characteristic of AI operations.
Schierenbeck highlighted that AI data centres exhibit significant fluctuations in power demand, unlike traditional office data centres.
“AI data centres are very, very different from these office data centres because they really spike up,” he told FT. “If you start your AI algorithm to learn and give them data to digest, they’re peaking in seconds and going up to 10 times what they have normally used.”
He advocated for regulatory measures similar to those applied to other industries, such as notifying utilities before initiating high power-consuming operations.
The International Energy Agency forecasts that data centre electricity usage will double to 945 terawatt-hours (TWh) by 2030, surpassing the current consumption of countries such as Japan.
Countries such as Ireland and the Netherlands have already imposed restrictions on new data centre developments due to concerns over their impact on electricity networks.
A US Department of Energy (DOE)-backed report, released in December last year, indicated that data centre power demand is projected to double or triple by 2028.
The report, produced by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, noted that total electricity usage by data centres jumped from 58TWh in 2014 to 176 TWh in 2023. Projections estimate this could rise further to between 325TWh and 580TWh by 2028.
Analysts at consultancy company Rystad Energy told FT that AI's power demands could potentially stabilise electricity grids if tech companies set maximum power limits and align AI model training with periods of abundant renewable energy.
Hitachi Energy is currently dealing with a global shortage of power transformers. Schierenbeck noted that addressing this shortage could take up to three years.
"AI power demand poses global supply risks, says Hitachi Energy" was originally created and published by Verdict, a GlobalData owned brand.
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