Datacenters that don't have their own power supplies will fail
It's time to ask your bit barn provider how they'll keep the lights on, and what their plans mean for prices
Availability of energy will determine the prices charged by datacenter operators, who won’t be viable unless they generate some of their own juice.
So says Bob Johnson, a VP analyst at Gartner, which on Tuesday published research titled “Emerging Tech: Top Trends in Data Center Power Provisioning.”
Johnson opens by suggesting the AI boom means “newer and larger data centers are being built at a rate that exceeds the support infrastructure that supports it – notably, the traditional power utilities’ ability to supply sufficient electricity.” While electricity utilities are building new generating capacity, those efforts take years and won’t come online in time to power the current datacenter construction pipeline.
Datacenter operators therefore can’t expect to get all the energy they need from the grid and most will build their own generating capacity. Gartner predicts that by 2028, “only 40 percent of all new data centers will rely solely on power delivered via the electricity grid network.”
The analyst firm therefore advises datacenter tenants to demand operators describe their power strategies, and document how those plans impact datacenter pricing.
Gartner thinks change is coming quite quickly and that in 2036, 40 percent of all new data centers “will rely on power generated on-site by new clean technologies that are not currently commercially available.”
The document mentions small modular reactors as one candidate that could help to power 2036’s new crop of datacenters, and notes Microsoft’s deal to acquire energy produced by fusion hints at another future source of juice.
The one generating technology Gartner mentions that is already viable at datacenter scale – hydrogen fuel cells – currently relies on natural gas as source of H and therefore produces plenty of greenhouse gases. Gartner points to the possibility of “green hydrogen” that’s the product of electricity generated by wind, solar or other renewables and then used to electrolyze water.
Whatever method datacenter operators use to generate electricity, Gartner thinks they’ll be crash test dummies and you’ll pay to help cure their bruises.
“Data center operators will be in the forefront of adopters for new emerging clean power generation technologies. However, like any first adopters, initial costs of these technologies will be high,” the analyst firm suggests.
“Initial users of data centers that rely on new clean power technologies will be expected to cover the necessary costs.”
Those costs will doubtless trickle down to every user of SaaS and IaaS.
Gartner thinks users need to consider the impact of energy prices and availability now.
“Add power sustainability to due diligence criteria of cloud services, including priority access to power and mitigation strategies in the case of limited availability,” Johnson suggests. ®