Data center consumes energy from a city of 30 thousand people – 03/30/2024 – Tech

Behind social networks, ChatGPT and banking apps are so-called data centers (data processing centers), warehouses full of supercomputers, air conditioning and coils. A single one of these large plants can consume the same energy as a city with 30 thousand inhabitants.

Adding only the large data centers in operation in Brazil, energy consumption would be almost that of a state like Tocantins. Although there is no official data, the Data Center Map project estimates that there are 119 units in the country, of which 41 are large, with around 10 megawatts of power each.

In an Equinix data center in the São Paulo city of Santana do Parnaíba (40 km from the capital and neighboring Barueri), visited by Sheet, The roar of the engine that runs the internet is so loud that you have to shout to maintain a conversation.

In a basically digital sector, data centers are the closest structure to the factory floor. In units such as Santana do Parnaíba, a dedicated substation is necessary to meet the energy demand linked to data processing.

Next to the data center headquarters, the high-voltage wires from Eletropaulo and two other suppliers in the free energy market hum with the vibration caused by the frequency of the electric current.

Energy consumption is in the same order as what is spent in a car factory, according to researcher José Luiz Romero Brito, USP’s Institute of Energy and Environment.

The difference is that, while automakers invest to optimize processes and reduce energy costs, the demand for electricity in data centers is expected to rise even more in the coming years, due to the expansion of the use of artificial intelligence.

Programs like ChatGPT subject data sets to complex probabilistic operations that require enormous computational power. The calculations are impossible to do on cell phones or personal computers, which is why they take place in data centers, which are in a race to update themselves.

An AI-optimized cabinet uses five times more energy than a machine prepared for procedures currently common in the IT (information technology) market.

According to Ascenty’s vice president of operations, Marcos Siqueira, there is a growing demand from companies for data processing services, which increases the responsibility that data centers need to have to minimize environmental impact.

By concentrating several boards in a compact space, to allow data processing at scale, and running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the machines generate a lot of heat. In a rack (machine rack), 1.5 meters high and 70 centimeters wide, there are 20 to 30 servers, each equivalent to a powerful computer.

To compensate, strong refrigeration is necessary, based on air conditioners and chilled water. One of the challenges of the data center is to maintain the ideal temperature, between 15ºC and 25ºC, so that the machine has optimized performance, says Eduardo Zago de Carvalho, president of Equinix for Latin America.

“Before, we cooled the entire environment, you had to wear a coat to enter a data center; now, we start using a cold and hot system that optimizes energy use”, says Vanessa Santos, development manager at Equinix.

It refers to the cold air that cools the top of the racks and makes the hot air rise. Another technique is the so-called “free cooling”, which releases hot air from the data center to the external environment, which reduces energy consumption by up to 40% at night.

For liquid cooling, data centers often use reused rainwater.

Companies are also working to bring more chips together in the same place, which makes it easier to cool the machines, although this locally increases heat dissipation.

To this end, there is investment in cables that transport data — the transmission frequency has tripled since last year, also to support the demand for artificial intelligence.

What is a data center like?

From the outside, a data center looks like a common corporate headquarters, with its three floors and mirrored windows that block the view from inside.

A data processing center is usually protected by an entrance with two doors: each of them only opens when the other is closed.

Furthermore, in the data center visited by Sheetthere is a corridor about 15 meters long lit by red LEDs, where there is a negative pressure system to prevent outside air from entering the area where the machines are located.

To maintain customer privacy and reduce the risk of invasion, the company does not allow photos to be taken inside the building. The reporter had to sign a confidentiality agreement to access the facilities.

On the first floor are the generators and pipes for the data center system. The heart, with the machines themselves, in the second.

The shelves with the computers are protected by bars called “cage” — cage in English. Only companies that rent computing power have access, and to guarantee this, physical and biometric keys are needed.

“The keys don’t leave here. The employee has to pick up the key at the entrance and return it later”, says Vanessa Santos, from Equinix.

The idea is that breaking into a data center is as difficult as shown in the movie “Mission: Impossible – Reckoning”, in which the character played by Tom Cruise dives in and needs outside help to access the machines.

Microsoft, in fact, has plans to maintain data centers on the icy bottom of the ocean, to save on cooling.

Brazil is the country where the most data centers have been installed in Latin America and the pace is driven by the high demand for artificial intelligence, the legal demands of the LGPD and the digitalization of the economy since the Covid pandemic, according to companies in the sector consulted by Sheet.

In 2023 alone, the country received 15 new data centers. There is, however, no data on the number of data processing centers in Brazil. The Internet Steering Committee and Anatel do not compile the number of data centers in the country.

In Brazil, data centers are concentrated in four hubs: São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Distrito Federal and Ceará. Close to the capital of São Paulo, Barueri is home to the fifth largest data center complex in the world.

The first two choices have to do with the consumer, residential and business market. These are the cities that consume the most internet and technology.

Brasília has the headquarters of the government and large banks as an attraction.

Ceará, in turn, is chosen because it is the gateway to the submarine cables that connect Brazil to the global internet. It also became a service distribution point for the North and Northeast regions.

The closer the data center is to the customer, the better the result, since there is a shorter response time between the request and the response, known as latency.

Some services require low latency to operate and encourage companies to distribute new plants throughout the territory. An example of this are the new automation solutions in the industry based on the internet of things, where extra milliseconds in the response can result in an error.

The largest data centers in the world are still in the United States, Europe and China, although high energy and water consumption leads to protests from industrial neighbors in cities in rich countries.

Brazil has the capacity to meet this demand as it already has a renewable energy matrix and suffers little from natural disasters, which can damage plant infrastructure.

The largest companies in the Brazilian market, according to a report by American consultancy Arizton, are Ascenty, Equinix and Oscala. The first two are building new data centers.

Ascenty has 20 data centers in Brazil and will build 6 more. Equinix has 7 and plans to leave 2 more standing — one in Rio and the other in São Paulo. The units already completed have the possibility of expansion and incremental improvements.

According to a survey by the specialized magazine Data Center Dynamics with 193 data center managers, 64% of companies in Latin America have expansion plans in the next 18 months. Brazil concentrates 40% of the region’s investment.

The majority (64%) of survey respondents, as of early 2024, planned to invest in construction or expansion in the coming months.

Public tenders to hire data center services cost millions of reais. In 2022, the municipality of Salvador spent R$2.7 million to host its applications and data in a data processing center.

This boom in data centers seeks to keep up with the explosive demand for generative artificial intelligence services such as ChatGPT.

At the same time, companies are working on smaller AI models, and personal device chip developers like Qualcomm are working to develop AI-ready technology, with the aim of decreasing demand for data centers.

“Perhaps more than a technological race, we are experiencing a race for energy efficiency to get AI projects off the ground,” says Silmar Palmeira, Qualcomm’s product director for Latin America.