Frontier, the world’s highest-performing supercomputer, consumes 8 M.W. and 30 M.W. of electrical energy, relying on the workload. Nonetheless, the upcoming AI data center is estimated to devour way more. India-based Reliance is ready to construct a 1 GWh (one-gigawatt hour) data center for AI that can run Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs, Reuters studies.
“Sooner or later, India goes to be the nation that can export AI,” stated Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, in line with Reuters. “You will have the basic elements – AI, data and AI infrastructure, and you’ve got a massive inhabitants of customers.”
The story doesn’t disclose the data center’s specs or compute functionality, maybe for aggressive causes. But, one may doubtlessly estimate D.C.’s efficiency based mostly on the facility consumption of Nvidia’s reference NVL36 and NVL72 Blackwell-based machines and their cooling necessities. We might, nevertheless, focus solely on its energy consumption.
Whereas this could be the world’s first gigawatt-class data center totally devoted to AI coaching, fashionable data facilities for business workloads devour significantly extra energy than modern supercomputers. For instance, Meta’s campus in Prineville, Oregon, was the most important electrical energy client, utilizing 1.375 GWh, for the corporate in 2023, in line with the corporate’s sustainability report. This data center is used for numerous workloads, adopted by Altoona, Iowa, which consumed 1.243 GWh, and Sarpy, Nebraska, at 1.148 GWh. Whereas we can’t say that every one of those data facilities are used for each AI coaching and typical Fb workloads, it’s evident that they aren’t used for one goal solely.
These Gigawatt-class data facilities are constructed within the U.S. But, Microsoft‘s Azure admits that for its next-generation AI data facilities in America, the aptitude of the U.S. energy grid may very well be a limiting issue as their energy consumption is rising quick. To provide energy to its data facilities, Microsoft plans to restart nuclear power plants, and its friends from the cloud enterprise, like AWS and Oracle, intend to do the identical.
Whether or not India’s energy grid is prepared for a gigawatt-class data center stays to be seen. In accordance with MercomIndia, all of India’s data facilities will devour round 193 GW in 2024, however there are literally thousands of them within the nation, so it actually stays to be seen how this 1 G.W. data center will probably be powered. Then once more, an announcement from two massive firms means that there’s a plan behind this main data center.