PassW0rd – 14 May 2025 (Data Highways)

Speaker A: This program is brought to you by Resonance FM. If you like what you hear, please support our work by making a donation at resonancefm.com/donate. Hello and welcome to Target, a program hosted by Peter Warren.

Speaker B: I’m Peter Warren, explaining to you the issues underlying the technology now underpinning our lives. In February of this year, we made a program about data centers their pivotal role in our lives, in AI development, and also what you need to know about their costs in terms of energy and the environment, and even more importantly, in geopolitical terms. This was the result of over a year and a half of investigation by Future Intelligence, the Password Program’s parent organization, which had revealed some stunning findings, including Concerns that will see the power needed by data centers in the US and the UK jump by between 4 and 6 times over the next 5 years. Competition for water in particular areas, and very real concerns about the geographical location of our data. It’s a topic that we’re returning to again because of the events that took place last month that demonstrate just how crucial data centers are now considered in our lives. Moving at unprecedented speed for a government, in April, in Whitehall, representatives from the energy sector including EDF, ScottishPower, Ofgem, and the National Grid were joined by tech giants including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Google, and the British semiconductor firm Arm, who all met at the launch of the AI Energy Council to discuss the infrastructure that needs to be built to power our new AI future. According to the Technology Secretary Peter Kyle, the work of the AI Energy Council will ensure we aren’t just powering our AI needs to deliver new ways of opportunity in all parts of the country, but can do so in a way which is responsible and sustainable. He added, this requires a broad range of expertise from industry and regulators as we fire up the UK’s economic engine to make it fit for the age of AI, meaning we can deliver the growth which is the beating heart of our plan for change. The Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, said: We are making the UK a clean energy superpower, building the homegrown energy this country needs to protect consumers and businesses and drive economic growth as part of our plan for change. It’s an ambitious statement, and one that we flesh out in this programme, because data centres are now as essential a part of the UK economy as roads, and in the future will become even more so, even deciding where roads will go. Last year, data centres were the great unknowns of the high-tech world. This year, because of AI, they are at the top of the political agenda, with both US President Donald Trump and UK Prime Minister Sakhir Starmer already laying out ambitious plans to build high-speed data networks. So far this year, the UK Premier has announced an investment of over £20 billion in creating a UK AI data centre superhighway. Though the figures released by the UK government at its International Investment Summit last October point to even more money being earmarked for AI infrastructure, with Blackstone committing to a massive £10 billion AI data centre in Blyth in Northumberland and Amazon Web Services pledging £8 billion on AI development. In the US, Donald Trump has dwarfed this, announcing a staggering $500 billion Stargate project last March. And it hasn’t stopped there. On Sunday, the 10th of February, President Macron announced France would be spending €109 billion on data centers and AI over 4 years. And 2 days later, at the end of the AI Action Summit in Paris, The EU’s Ursula von der Leyen announced the AI race is far from over in a speech announcing further tens of billions of AI investment following the private €150 billion EU AI Champions Initiative that had been announced the day before. And she added that an Invest AI initiative would top up these investments by €50 billion. Making it the largest public-private partnership in the world. Because data centers are now geopolitically important. Not only will they decide AI development, but it has also become important that they are based in particular countries so that data does not flow beyond borders or zones like the EU, a trend now dubbed data sovereignty. So It’s incredibly appropriate that we devote this program to these data centers and developments that are essential to every social media message, every internet search, every YouTube broadcast, every earnest podcast, every video call. In fact, everything we do online. And now, as we have found, each data center will be the echo of the starter pistols in the AI arms race. Bland, anonymous, and boring, data centers are something we are happy to leave permanently in the background of our bright internet-lit lives, quietly humming away on the outskirts of our towns as we get on with the serious business of living on our phones and laptops. Yet without those data centers, our lives would grind to a halt and leave us staring blankly at our empty screens.. But they also represent a competitive threat to us, not just because of AI, but because of their demands for water and energy that will be massively increased by AI usage. Here’s Professor Andrew Chien, the William Eckhart Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, a former vice president of research for the US chip giant Intel, and an expert on computer power use on the issue. On the Issue.

Speaker A: As recently as 20 years ago, when we were at the turn of the millennium, computing was just a tiny, tiny part of electrical power consumption in the world. And it was that for a lot of reasons. One, because computing wasn’t used for everything like it is today. But also it was because we’d been riding this wonderful technology curve around Moore’s Law and Dennard scaling that had allowed us to to have the technology become much more efficient. So even though we used more and more computing, the power use didn’t increase that much. That’s why at the turn of the millennium we had 10-megawatt data centers and today we’re talking about gigawatts, right? So the question would be, what changed? Well, two things. One is the exponential growth finally caught up with us. We got to be really large. And then the second thing is that we’ve seen a slowing of those technological advances. Of Moore’s Law, and Dennard scaling ended about 2005. So now it’s catching up and we’re starting to see data centers as really, really large power consumers.

Speaker B: And that power consumption, I was remotely attending a conference that was going on in America for, I think it was the National Academy of Sciences. They were saying that that power use is going to be incredible. I mean, you talk about Moore’s Law, people were saying that there’s going to be a sixfold increase in energy demands over the next 6 years.

Speaker A: Yeah, that’s right. The projections for, say, the United States in particular are that the power consumption of data centers will grow from maybe 2% to about 8 or 9% by 2030. So that’s 5 years away now. And that increase will be 80 gigawatts of average consumption. Interestingly, for various reasons, the United States or North America actually has about half of the world’s data centers. So you can think of the global number as being 2 times that, generally speaking. And to make it really sort of poignant and to the point, that’s pretty scary to begin with, but just think about what comes after that if that continues. It’s the next 5 years that will really make an impact.

Speaker B: So that is what, because of artificial intelligence, or shall we say large language models, because of the way that the amount of processing that they currently demand.

Speaker A: Yeah, it’s, it’s a, it’s a good, good question. So it’s popular in the press to focus on the newest thing and AI and large language models. There’s no question they’re a big driver of this, but it’s also true that the cloud itself had already been a big driver of this. And we would probably be in talking about data centers being a few percent, right? Maybe not 8%, but maybe 4% or something like that. 4 or 5% in 2030, even if we didn’t have this huge AI driver. But there’s no question AI has like put this growth on steroids. And that’s because it’s a fundamentally different way of delivering services, right? It’s made what were mostly information-intensive services on the internet, serving web search or some other kind of thing like that, IT services, into a compute-intensive service, which is what this large language model is. It’s like a giant sparse matrix computation. They do it every time you put 3 words into ChatGPT.

Speaker B: Which is one of the odd things, isn’t it? I mean, people aren’t aware, for instance, that every time they put 3 words into ChatGPT or a search engine, that a certain amount of water is needed to cool it.

Speaker A: Ah, well, there’s electricity, as we’ve talked about, and there’s water. Water is used in 2 ways in most data centers. Nowadays for GPUs and the like, it’s popular to use water to do closed-loop cooling, where you pump cold water over the GPUs and then warm water comes out and then you vent the heat and you recirculate the water. That’s not so bad. But the thing that’s bad is that in order to increase the energy efficiency of the data centers, many data centers have been doing what’s called evaporative cooling, which is just what you do on a hot day in the summer when you put a cold rag on your head. You get the endothermic reaction of water evaporating to carry away the heat. So it turns out that’s a really energy-efficient way to remove heat from the data center. So these data centers literally spray water into the air in order to get rid of their heat. The problem with that is for environmental purposes, that effectively destroys the water from the environment because it goes off into the air and it flies away in the atmosphere. So people talk about that as water consumption, and that has become a great concern for data centers. It’s become a very pressing concern over the last year. But there’s, there’s reason for hope. A number of the large hyperscalers have committed to having their future data centers not use water in that way. But not everyone has committed to do that. And even the most progressive companies that have committed to do that for their future data centers, data centers haven’t committed to retrofitting their old data centers, for which there’s quite a bit already, to stop use of this kind of evaporative technique. So that’s a big concern. Obviously, it’s more of a concern in places where water’s in short supply. In the desert, in the Southwest of the United States, for example. Perhaps where you’re sitting, it’s not so much of a concern. I don’t know, the Thames is a pretty large river. Where I sit in Chicago, We have the Great Lakes, which is the largest supply of fresh water, I think, in the world. But even here, people are concerned about water use.

Speaker B: Chicago University’s Professor Andrew Chien, who we will be hearing more from later. The picture in the US has been terrifying scientists, as they made clear in a meeting last November at the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, where they pointed out that data centers in Virginia were now competing with the state’s inhabitants for clean water. Something that could very soon be occurring in the UK because of the concentration of data centers around London, particularly near the UK’s data center capital, Woking. It’s a concentration that Dr. Helen Munro of the data infrastructure company Pulsen pointed out.

Speaker C: In a recent report that Zep TK published There was a figure that cited around 80% of data center capacity is centered in that Greater London region. We’ve got a few sites down there ourselves, but in terms of supporting kind of regions across different cities, you know, we’ve got quite a few different locations. One of the interesting aspects, as well as the requirement for latency to serve various different sort of smart applications and applications that might kind of demand a data center that’s physically close to where that latency is being demanded is how the data center might interact with the local available energy. So one of the really interesting things that’s happening in the energy markets within the UK is that the different regions have different levels of emissions intensity. So for instance, Scotland, we’ve got lots of wind power, and quite often there’s— when the wind’s blowing, we can’t use all the electricity within that Scottish region, and we can’t transmit it elsewhere within the UK either, constraints on that transmission network. So at that point it’s high, you’re effectively kind of any extra power that you’re using is not having an impact in terms of demand for gas generation, whereas a lot of the regions in other parts of the UK are still kind of the marginal demand that’s not being taken up by— that’s not supported by renewable energy is being taken up by traditional gas generation mostly. So there’s some kind of really interesting dynamics between the different characteristics of power grids across the UK. And it does raise some interesting questions about if you’re planning an IT workload, should you think about that in terms of where you’re going to actually put it?

Speaker B: Well, also there’s another point too, isn’t there, which is, it will probably go some way towards your carbon footprint. And it possibly could be something that you could say, yeah, I’m offsetting this because I’m using renewable energy.

Speaker C: Yeah, the way I see it, the renewable energy question is one side of the energy coin. I think there’s two sides of the coin. Firstly is what are data center organizations doing with their purchasing power? Are they doing all they can to buy energy in a good way. But that’s a separate question from what are they actually using, because, you know, data centers are all— I say in the UK, they’re all on the grid. So when data centers use energy, they’re demanding energy on that particular grid region and using that grid infrastructure. So if you think about the marginal impact of, say, increasing or reducing power consumption, and that’s going to sort of increase and reduce demand on whatever generation source is providing the most flexible output. And typically that’s— that doesn’t want to be gas, because wind energy, unless there’s a surplus, we can’t really control how much of it there is. Same with solar. Nuclear is— it doesn’t flex up and down very responsibly. So, you know, the gas takes up the slack in a lot of the regions.

Speaker B: Which is one of the reasons why everybody’s suddenly started to become interested in hydrogen, because hydrogen could take up slack in a similar way, even though that capability isn’t yet there. Although I understand from people that I’ve been talking to— I went to Leipzig, which is meant to be the green hydrogen capital of Europe. There, people are doing lots of research into this. I mean, one of the big problems in all of this is that people aren’t aware, are they, that there’s a cost in moving data?

Speaker C: What do you mean by a cost in moving data?

Speaker B: Well, obviously, if you’re processing locally, it’s not as expensive as if you’re going to move data to process it centrally. It’s one of the issues that they were talking about in America. Was that if you’re going to move data, physically move data, obviously it means that you use energy and you use cycles, etc., etc. So if you’re going to ask a question in a— I mean, I think that there was an interesting figure. I haven’t got it to my fingertips at the moment, but it was the cost in terms of water for a Google search. The amount of water that is used in the Google search is significant.

Speaker A: So that’s what I mean.

Speaker C: The question of water is an interesting one, and I don’t have answers about that. What I have seen on a lot of the analysis is that the water consumption figures that have been looked at include both water that might be used in the data centers cooling system and water that’s used in cooling electricity generation. So, you know, a gas-fired power plant, for example. And what we’re seeing with it, you know, the environment agencies do, and even a bit of work around this, is trying to— some data centers use water as part of their cooling systems, Some data centers don’t. It’s not quite clear how many data centers within the UK actually do go through a lot of water, but it’s something that operators are moving towards a bit more of a consciousness over. There’s quite a few data center operators that are starting to disclose a bit more information about their water use and the metric of efficiency.

Speaker B: Dr. Helen Monroe of the data infrastructure company Pulsant, underlining the need for cooling water in data centers and the fact that AI will compete with people in urban areas for fresh water. It’s a competition that makes it tempting to site data centers in remote areas, pushing them into conflict with wildlife and the environment. While not greatly contributing to local economies to make them more attractive. Here’s Chicago University’s Professor Qian, a speaker at the National Academies meeting once again.

Speaker A: I think that data centers are in competition with people and of course with wildlife, you know, with the environment and biodiversity and all those things that are concerns. I think people do good studies Freshwater supply and freshwater stress is actually pretty widespread in the world these days. And you don’t even need to go into how climate change might be making that more difficult. But say, for example, in the western United States and in the Southwest, I think anything, any industrial use that goes in and consumes water is in competition with wildlife and people and so on. There are whole nations, like in India, where much of the country is in water stress all of the time. So, so I’m sure they’re looking at that with, looking at it with the view that fundamentally, how do we develop this information technology economy that we have to have and then deal with these challenges? You know, China is, is something we often talk about and China has huge water stress in many parts of, of the Chinese geographic area, right? The water’s not well distributed, as they say, right? So I think it’s a, it’s a common problem and I’m sure, you know, there’s parts of Europe that have the issues. I’m just not as familiar.

Speaker B: It’s evident, isn’t it? I mean, all you have to do is watch a wildlife program about Africa and see— or India— and see that they have a wet and a dry season. So obviously water is going to be in shortage in certain places at certain times of the year, which therefore will create competition. However, one of the things that people were talking about at the National Academy conference was that Virginia has issues of water supply because of the amount of data centers in Virginia.

Speaker A: Yeah, actually, so two things worth calling out. One is in the power grid in Virginia, the Dominion Energy area, mostly the data centers have now grown up to be almost 25% of the power grid. That’s an amazingly large number. And if you take 25% and you compound it with 20% growth a year, You know, it doesn’t take you that long to get to 50. So those are amazing numbers. But, you know, the concern of the, of the local Virginia community points out the following problem with data centers. So you put a data center in a community, the benefits of the data center don’t accrue to that community. It’s part of this global internet. It’s serving this generative AI request. Who knows? I mean, people, yeah, people in Virginia, but people in California and people in Canada and people in the UK, they’re using these services. So there’s this misalignment with the environmental costs, which of course are local, and the attributed benefits. And, and that creates a bunch of interesting tensions. And of course, the local community’s view is we’re not getting the benefits and we’re suffering the costs and you, this big company, are making off with the profits. So how do we balance this ledger, if you will? So that everyone gets at least what they deserve, or at least something.

Speaker B: We made a program about energy just recently, and one of the things that people were talking about was possibly using wave power. There was some discussion about using tidal power, although apparently tidal power can only be used in certain places where it’s actually going to be— you’re able to harness the power of the tide. That said then, that would almost suggest that you would say, okay, well, where we can harness the power of the tide, for example, why don’t we site loads and loads of data centers there? Because there we’ve got sustainable energy. This was again another point that came up in the conference where people were saying, why are all of these data centers in Virginia? Why can’t we put them in Texas?

Speaker A: That’s a great question. And you probably know from my personal research, we’ve been trying to study where data centers should be placed and how they can take advantage of excess renewable energy. So that’s not exactly the requirement that you put the data centers next to renewable energy. But if you think about transmission and congestion, where you will quickly conclude that, well, you’d like to be closer, and maybe even the ultimate closest, which is right on top of it. So I think you’re starting to see that, because what happens is when you have a lot of renewable energy in locations, the power prices tend to be low. And there can be a lot of supply. So you’ve been hearing about for decades people building data centers in the Northwest of the United States, in Washington State, in Oregon, where they have these massive hydroelectric dams, right? Old-fashioned renewables, if you will. And you’re seeing it in places where, you know, Microsoft has built data centers out in Iowa. China is building them in Gansu, right? You know, where they have massive renewables. So you are starting to see some of that. So the question is, why aren’t they all in places like that? Like that? Well, it turns out that the internet actually does care about location a little bit. And the way it cares about location is that there’s latency in the time of flight of, well, photons in fibers, but information across the world is limited by some fraction of the speed of light. So if you have to access from London, the data centers in Virginia, then it’s going to be some time of flight. If it’s Japan, you know, it’s another distance in and so on. So what happened over time is that people have built data centers in clusters. And those clusters are centered around large bundles of fibers that, say, transit the Atlantic. In the case of the United States, that’s very close to a lot of government infrastructure that’s super important and so on. So as you get these clusters like in Northern Virginia, as we were talking about, then there becomes a critical mass effect. So it’s not just you and me accessing that data center. Now more and more of the Internet is data centers talking to each other. So, you know, your virtual machine in Amazon talking to somebody else’s virtual machine in Google talking to somebody else’s virtual machine in Microsoft. And then maybe they’re talking to Facebook. And let’s see if I can touch on all of the players here. So there’s these synergies about being close by. And by some estimates I’ve seen that 50% of the world’s Internet traffic flows around in Northern Virginia. And the way I like to explain this, to just crystallize it, is you might think of the internet as not having a center of mass. But if it has a center of mass, it’s in Northern Virginia. So that kind of thinking is actually what drives this pressure to put all of that stuff in particular places.

Speaker B: But there’s another issue too, isn’t there? And again, it was one that was touched on in the conference, which is something that, again, people don’t think about. But it costs money to move data. It costs energy to move data. And people just because of, I suppose, our lack of familiarity with the way that this technology has evolved, we don’t think about that.

Speaker A: Yeah, that’s right. And one of the interesting projections that was done now a number of years ago, sort of, I think right around 2019 or 2020, looked at how data center power would grow and how internet, that is the actual networking power, would grow. And it’s kind of amazing, actually, at that time, they were projecting that the actual transmission of information through these wide area links and so on, and the super fast 5G wireless that we all live on and so on these days, would actually be comparable to the data centers. Now with generative AI, I think it’s probably not quite going to be comparable, but it could be half or something like that. So there’s a gigantic amount of energy. And the thing that’s hard for us to understand is because the energy per bit is so small, right, is that even though the technologies are quite efficient, the quantities of data that are being transmitted are staggering. Like, you know, we’re doing a video call, right? This is a huge amount of data with a gigantic amount of resolution. And everyone does this every day for free in the world. So now you got maybe a billion people doing this kind of stuff. So they’re moving a huge amount of data. They’re streaming videos, right? They’re watching movies. So there’s a very, very large amount of data being moved— gigabytes, you know, maybe even terabytes per person per day. And that’s what accounts for the very, very large amount of energy that the networks are using.

Speaker B: So, as Professor Qian says, at the moment we really have not thought about the closely associated issues of AI and electrical power. That it’s essential is obvious, and it should be noted that in last October’s UK Investment Summit, over £26 billion of the £63 billion announced was from energy companies announcing an increase in electricity production. One of the silver linings for the UK, because as regular listeners to Password will know from past programs on energy and data centers, The UK is in a unique position to harness power from the wind and the sea due to its geographical location, something that we should grasp as an opportunity to develop new businesses, according to Chris Hocknell, head of the wave power company Hversa.

Speaker E: If we get it right, there are a lot of opportunities. I’m not sure we are always thinking of it in the correct manner. But yeah, there’s, there’s certainly a lot of opportunity for this transition. It can create jobs. All over the place. One of the problems we do have is actually we, because we don’t really make a great deal here, so much of the green tech, for example, is obviously imported. And that’s a bit of a missed opportunity because I suppose if we, if we go big on heat pumps or any other kind of technology, green tech, because most of that is manufactured and most of the jobs sit elsewhere, that’s to other countries’ benefits. But if we’re a bit smarter and tactical about the things, I do believe we can, you know, we could be talking hundreds of thousands of jobs, uh, new jobs. In various different sectors. Just the enhancement and the improvement of the grid infrastructure that’s needed to obviously change the energy system, that alone creates 20,000 permanent jobs. And, uh, yeah, that’s not to be sniffed at.

Speaker B: Somebody that we’re going to be interviewing tells me that some people are talking about plans to start sailing ships going around the coast of the UK, which would rejuvenate all of these old ports and harbours that we used to have. And it sounds quite romantic.

Speaker E: Yeah, I suppose it does. I mean, that’s one of the key things, I suppose, if we start— I mean, I think this does come with some security issues, but we’re going to move a lot of electricity generation infrastructure from on land in very localised, high density kind of generation points throughout the country to less dense, much spread out areas. Away from the land and into the, into the sea with, you know, for example, the huge offshore wind farm that’s planned at Dogger Bank. That is absolutely enormous. And that’s obviously, as I said, there are some— I have a great deal of security concerns about that. But I mean, that whole East Coast will— well, you’ll need people going, thousands of people coming and going every day for maintenance and all kinds of surveys and things like that. And if, yeah, if done properly, You could think of a very, I think, a very effective way to rejuvenate some of these communities that have really been chewed out and spat out from obviously changing habits and tourism and deindustrialization, etc. Hopefully a lot of those seaside towns, as we know, have got a lot of problems. It’d be fantastic to think that we could create a lot of high-tech, or at least highly paid technician jobs there. That would be an incredibly exciting prospect.

Speaker B: Yeah, it would mean that places like Clacton would suddenly have a complete rejuvenated economy, and it might even make them want to change their MP. One of the people that we’ve been interviewing, this is a fascinating comment, was that he was talking about all of these islands that are in the Pacific, for example. And, you know, hitherto they would have had problems with conventional energy. And this guy was an expert on wave power. And he was saying, well, there they are, they’re surrounded by this ocean of energy. It’s just that they haven’t been looking at it in the right way. That’s the big problem that we’ve had, isn’t it? We’ve been a bit sort of energy myopic.

Speaker E: Yeah, I say so. I think we’ve certainly of the— in the complexions and the ideologies within governments for decades now seem to have quite shied away from the idea of industrial strategies and and I suppose advanced technical, technically, I suppose, based strategies to this problem. It’s a real shame. And, you know, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many other countries have made a lot of progress in and around, you know, latching on to these industries and creating sectors and employment, etc., as we touched on before. I’ve been hearing about wave and tidal power in the UK, its potential. For, for decades now. And we just— it says, oh, you know, the UK has got the greatest resources, or one of the greatest resources and opportunities there, but very little happens. And often when you find— this was really the case with the previous government— then anytime we found some, I suppose, public-private partnership notion or idea, would be it was small modular reactors or something like that, the government would put in some pitiful amount, 40, 50 million, when they were expecting the private sector to put in £3 or £4 billion. And it’s just not really been taken seriously. And that lack of investment and that kind of agnosticism, I suppose, to technologies and industrial strategy is something that I think is quite sad. It’s ground my gears for quite a while because we’re kind of trapped in a bit of a stasis while other countries and industries move on. I mean, all of the wind turbines are made somewhere else, all of the PV panels are made somewhere else. All the heat pumps are made somewhere else. We do very, very little in this, and while we’ve got very grand ambitions, you know, we don’t have much in the way of domestic capacity and opportunity. And some that we do have, I suppose, innovation from an academic perspective, we are obviously still doing quite well in the UK. But usually, as we know, once it reaches a certain point, it goes off to the US to get commercialized, or perhaps somewhere else in East Asia, and then it really leaves. So yeah, I think the government’s also got a lot to blame in this. They really have not seen a strategic opportunity and nowhere near, near and away, investment has gone into it at all in the last kind of 10, 15 years.

Speaker B: Chris Hocknell of the wave power company 8 Versa, echoing the comments from many of those interviewed for our green energy program last September. For renewable energy to work, it has to make business sense, particularly because even making AI use less energy due to new innovations like DeepSeq will not mean that we use less of it. And as many people have stressed, AI development has not really started in many parts of the world. Here’s Professor Chien once again on why our AI use will only increase.

Speaker A: Sometimes increasing the efficiency doesn’t actually reduce consumption. So it basically increases consumption because it enables it to be easier and easier to use. So he was studying coal, right, and steam engines, but it applies equally to computing. So the fact that each video conference gets cheaper means that they can be given away for free, which means that I can use 10 a day instead of 1 a day or something like that. So I think that computing has been the, you know, poster child for what’s called take-back in the environmental community or Jevons paradox paradox that every quest to make it more efficient causes more use to happen. Now, I’m not against efficiency, right? I don’t mean to say that the efficiency is not worthwhile because the use, I think, is enriching our lives, right? So it makes things possible, it makes, you know, gives us joy, gives us commerce, all those things. But I don’t think people who think efficiency is going to solve this problem really understand economics. Impacts in human behavior. I’ve begun to work actually not on efficiency over the last 10 years. I’ve come to the conclusion that sustainability has to be about holistically trying to mitigate the negative impacts of the consumption, because you cannot slow the increase of the consumption. And autonomous cars are going to make that even worse. We’re going to have more cars.

Speaker B: I can see that as the postulated future progression of the technology will be, that we will be in 3D environments and increasingly realistic 3D environments with even greater data demands than, as you’re saying, that the efficiency will just lead to more consumption.

Speaker A: It looks that way. I don’t know about the 3D environments, but it looks like consumption grows steadily. And, you know, it’s not just us, those of us living in the developed world have to be a little bit humble about this. We’re already living a high consumption lifestyle. There’s billions of people that aspire to this kind of high consumption lifestyle. And we have no right to prevent them from, from growing into this, this kind of rich life that we have. So we have to prepare to find ways to sustainably support this growth in consumption that appears to be inevitable.

Speaker B: But one of the problems for those people, and again, it’s, this is something that we picked up on in previous radio programs, is that there is this huge data divide in places like Africa. As you say, they won’t have the data center infrastructure to be able to get that life that you’re talking about unless they actually go over into the servers where the servers are, which are 50%, as you say, in the US, but a substantial amount in the UK and Europe as well.

Speaker A: I would separate two things, right? So I would say without doubt, there’s going to be a huge, hugely larger number of data centers and data in Africa over the next 10, 20, 30 years. So that number is growing, right? Are they going to catch up to the numbers that are growing in the developed world? Well, that’s hard, right? In the US and UK, they’re growing exponentially, right? So how do you catch up? But I think there’s no question that there’s secular growth across all of these, and that’s the environmental problem.

Speaker B: And data centers do not just hold issues to the environment. Underlying the movement for data centers in Europe and other parts of the world are geopolitical concerns. Having your nation’s data outside of your national borders is increasingly being seen as a national security issue, and currently over 50% of the world’s data centers are in the US, and data from Europe arrives there through undersea cables that come up in Virginia, the place where data centers are now competing with people for water. It’s also a state that, due to the emergence of those undersea cables, that has also been traditionally attractive to the powerful US intelligence agencies, the CIA and the NSA, which have their headquarters nearby.

Speaker A: There is an interest in control over data. I think that is the continuing trend of historical assertion of sovereignty by nations. There’s no question that the data is probably as important, if not more important, than physical sovereignty over, over over people, spaces, enforcement of law, and so on. So that’s one of the big societal challenges to work it out because the dream of the internet pioneers, which was information flowing freely everywhere, wherever it wants, and the famous information rules that were published by this gentleman at Harvard, they just don’t work with those dimensions of society. So this is one of the big struggles we face. And perhaps I guess it’s not surprising that half of the data centers in the United States are in North America, uh, because in some sense the data can move more freely and might be argued as more valuable, can be exploited for more value in the United States because we have so little regulation around that. Right now, I’m not saying that’s the way it should be. I’m just saying that as an observation about where we are.

Speaker B: But there’s also another observation that somebody could make. You say that those data centers, for example, that, that are located in North Virginia have been there because of the fiber optics get in the ground. That’s also where cables come across from the Atlantic. So those are places where that data can be analyzed. It can be, as you say, it can be picked out for its value by the large big tech companies. And you want to do that, as you say, for sighting reasons as closely as possible, because it’s economics, isn’t it? It’s economics that is actually driving that, driving that cluster.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that’s right. It’s economics and, you know, that kind of economic structure goes back to the insurance exchanges in London, the stock exchange in New York, and so on. These are information mountains, if you will, that have led to economic activity and value for— and these things are not new human trends, right? It’s not just Northern Virginia, right? There’s an analog of this on the other side where there’s a cluster of data centers in Ireland. Because Ireland is where many of these cables are coming in and mediation. Everyone knows about the Great Firewalls in China. Those are the moral equivalent, right, of this peripheral boundary, right? So I think, you know, this is just the evolution of the structure of how information is shared and stored and mediated in the world being expressed in the internet.

Speaker B: Professor Andrew Chien, the William Eckhart Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, a former vice president of research for the US chip giant Intel and an expert on computer power use, whose help in the making of this program has been invaluable. If you’d like to hear the full interview with Professor Chien, please log on to the Future Intelligence website, www.futureintelligence.co.uk, where you will find it as our latest Peter Warren interview podcast. On the 21st of January, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, giving evidence to the House of Lords Environment and Climate Change and Science and Technology Committees, not only confirmed that the government expected to see electricity use soar over the next 4 years, he added that it expected it to double from today’s figure by 2050. A 100% increase driven by technology.. It is these concerns, and those expressed by Professor Qian, that are driving many involved in the industry to call for the very joined-up thinking about AI, electrical power, and cooling that we may now be seeing in Whitehall with the AI Energy Council. A development Sean Redmond, head of Silicon Catalyst, one of the government’s advisers on computer development, says has to happen?

Speaker F: We need, as you say, a 22nd century network infrastructure that’s going to take us to delivering on— as AI compute grows at 10x per year, the amount of data moved around the network is going to move with it. We have to be able to have infrastructure that deals with that. Otherwise, it becomes the bottleneck. And in fact, it is You know, switching is the bottleneck for all data centers, and network switching is recognized as a fundamental blocker of progress. Some of what we’re talking about here hasn’t even been invented yet, so needs to be. So, you know, what’s available? Could UK infrastructure invest in that and improve it? Yes, but if it takes another 5 to 10 years, we’ll be delivering orders of magnitude improvements in technology which is needed in the UK.

Speaker B: What’s really interesting about what you’re saying is that AI is enormously inefficient, isn’t it? What we’re doing, everybody is presenting it as this sort of sentience. It’s not sentience. It’s just huge amounts of responses being plastered across something until something seems to make sense at the top of it. And so it’s probabilistic with the determinism of a human being sitting on top saying, oh yeah, that’s it, and you’ve done that faster than me. But as a process, it’s terribly inefficient. And so what you’re saying is that we have got this terribly inefficient system. We’re using huge amounts of energy to make that work at the moment. And also in terms of the distribution of that information, when you’ve got more and more and more people asking for more and more and more solutions to a particular issue and they’re asking for all of that compute, you’re just accelerating this, this enormously inefficient process. So do we need better chips in strategic places? Using the current model? And if so, where do we need those chips? I do. We need them in sort of localized servers or localized service centers, or do we need to? Because evidently we need to solve those problems that you’ve outlined so eloquently already about, you know, what we do with this. I mean, the weird thing about this is It’s been presented in the media as though it’s a done deal and we’ve solved everything. We haven’t.

Speaker F: This is literally the start. You’re absolutely right there, Peter. You know, this really is literally just the start, which makes it exciting, but also somewhat terrifying as well, because if, if we go down the same path we’re treading, then 15 to 20% of the world’s electricity consumption will be data center requirements. That’s not sustainable. We don’t have enough energy supply to do that today. And so if we’re talking about infrastructure, if we keep going down the same path and relentlessly repeating what we’re currently doing, then we’ll need to seriously think about power station infrastructure in the UK because we wouldn’t be able to sustain that amount of data center compute. So we’ve got to move it out of the data center. It’s got to move to the edge. Primarily because, you know, moving decisions up and down to where it actually is needed doesn’t make a lot of sense anyway. So it slows everything down and uses a lot of energy through the data center switching. And so those architectures at the edge are really important. And I think even improving the energy efficiency of them, if you could make them near zero energy, what a wonderful world we would be living in because that really transforms application spaces. Applications start to arise that we just wouldn’t even conceive of today. It’s a bit like the transformation, you know, went to the mobile phone and then suddenly all of it became this compute engine. And we live off that world of application-driven computing in our hands today. So near-zero energy compute at the edge, all sorts of wonderful new applications would emerge. Which will come down to transforming healthcare in society, transforming our environmental challenges in cities, dealing with crime. Then we start to talk about transformational things. If you can get down to near zero energy compute, which I think is a wonderful ambition to have, And it’s great that we’re seeing that in the UK because you don’t quite— you don’t see it elsewhere. This absolute drive for performance is the undying sort of driving factor that comes out of the US all the time. And yet what we see out of our research base is, well, let’s solve the energy consumption problem of this.

Speaker B: Sean Redmond, managing partner of Silicon Catalyst and a government advisor on its industrial digital strategy, on the need for clear thinking over AI development. A clear thinking that must be focused on due to the sudden race towards AI. In February of this year, speaking at the Paris AI Action Summit, US Vice President J.D. Vance made a speech setting out the need for positivity around AI development. Both the US and the UK also declined to sign an agreement regulating the It is an attitude the UK Prime Minister has set out as a central plank of policy. To deploy technology and create the next revolution, not only must regulation be light, he said, opposition to infrastructure developments must also be minimised. Saying no to pylons does not appear to be an option. It’s planning that Azhar Aslam, vice president and chief technology officer of the telecommunications and data centre multinational Nokia, says is essential.

Speaker D: So what we are seeing now, and if you look at the projections based on the AI workload growth, but also the traditional IT workload growth, and, and just take the example of Europe, we are looking at something like 3.5 times more capacity requirement in the data centers going forward because of all the things that are happening, AI and non-AI. AI enterprise as well as in consumer markets. So when we look at the overall growth of the infrastructure needed going forward from the compute and storage and other requirements point of view, it’s a pretty staggering amount. It’s easy to say 3.5 times, but when you look at the capacity available within the data centers today, a lot of the big data centers are starting to run out of the available compute and storage capacity. And that’s partly because of the power availability for these data centers. So power suddenly became an interesting limiting factor in us, in our ability to drive more compute and analysis using the AI capabilities. So when we pull these two things together, the physical infrastructure of the data centers, which is basically the space available to put the racks and servers and compute and storage in, the power availability to those data centers and the limitations on that, what we find is that we will require a lot of the compute capability going forward. It may just not happen in the same locations that we have been used to over the last few years. And what that implies then is that the data centers will have to start to be distributed a lot more. And we started to see that, by the way, in Europe in the sense when we started to look at the sovereignty requirements coming from various governments across Europe. And by the way, in other parts of the world as well. And that was the first start of, okay, well, we need to distribute the data centers and put specific ones in certain countries. That came from the regulatory requirements. But now we’re looking at the actual physical limitations within the data centers that require the data center infrastructure to be distributed a lot more. And I think that question almost implies, do we do that for the latency purposes, latency requirements purposes or others? I know there are some industrial use cases that warrant the data centers to be very close to, for example, a manufacturing plant or another industry vertical patient. So if utility grids are running some analysis and inferencing models, then they want that analysis to be done close enough to them. But I think the fundamental reason here is really the power availability. If we cannot deliver more power from the utility grids, and that could be across the world, across EU and specific countries as well, if we cannot deliver that power that is required by the data center, then we’ve got to be able to find ways of delivering power somewhere else. And that starts to distribute the data center in locations that initially you wouldn’t have thought about. And I’ll give you some examples. We are looking at in Europe some potential customers where they want to deploy data centers closer to renewable sites, basically where you have the renewable energy production. Now, it sounds like a good idea because we will have green energy available to run these data centers. That’s a tick in the box. But sometimes these renewable energy sources aren’t very reliable in the sense that the wind doesn’t always blow and then there’s not always sunlight. It creates an interesting proposition to distribute because of the power constraints into those locations closer to renewables. But then you’ve got to also be able to distribute the workloads. Fundamentally, it’s the power availability that dictates how much compute can be put in a particular location, how much of it can be expanded in a particular location. And yes, your point on putting services closer to the end customers enterprises and industry verticals is a correct one. And there are cases that we are seeing across in Europe, but also in the rest of the world that we will put these data centers closer to those locations because of the latency requirements as well.

Speaker B: I mean, this is an issue of planning, isn’t it? Everything you’ve been talking about is planning. One of the things that people have been talking about in terms of actually putting these distributed data centers into different places, is that this is part of a process in the UK. My personal viewpoint is that we’re not really quite there on this planning and this thinking through, that we have to develop this a lot more, don’t we? Because if we are going to be talking about 3.5 more compute, we’re talking about 6 times more energy.

Speaker D: I think the way you’ve got to look at it is that this is an infrastructure that has evolved based on certain trajectory which was a very interesting technology that solved a business problem and it has been adopted quite widely already and that’s the cloud services which then runs on the data centers and the networks. I think going forward we just need to pay a little bit more attention to the infrastructure build and have a structured approach to make sure that we pay sufficient attention to this kind of infrastructure, which is becoming a critical infrastructure. If you think about the wider economy, the society, how much of both of those things depend on the cloud today, it’s staggering. Economies run on this infrastructure. The societies run on this infrastructure. Government and defense now starts to run on this infrastructure as well. We need a strategic plan across across the board to be able to meet the future requirements. Otherwise, it creates a risk that we will not have sufficient of this infrastructure, which means we will have to compromise on certain type of services or service availability or reliability of those services for the citizens and the businesses. So there’s, there’s got to be a structured approach. We are seeing that across the world in certain countries and regions, and Europe is those. If you look at these innovations in the renewable sites where companies have started to test out these technologies, I mean, we’re working with a customer in Norway, for example, that is building data centers close to natural resources for cooling and water and renewable energy in the same locations. So very nice combination of all three things that you require to maintain the data centers. I think as these these capabilities mature and more efficiencies are gained in each of these domains, I think we will see a little bit more reliability of putting these data centers into these renewable locations. Obviously not all locations will be suitable for that, but at least the trend is starting. And to deal with the situation that you’ve just described, you will need to have that distributed infrastructure so that you’re not taking the resources from the communities in a way that is detrimental to them. You’re actually doing both of these things, supporting the communities, supporting the environment, but also meeting the demand that these infrastructures will be needed to provide going forward.

Speaker B: One of the biggest problems that you must have is that you are now in a situation of almost flux. The other day I saw that the French were going ahead with an undersea turbine project where they were going to be generating power from windmills under the sea. Obviously, people in East Anglia would prefer that because we wouldn’t see all of these wind turbines on the horizon. I’m not sure the whales would like it, but you must be looking at technologies all of the time. People have been saying in the UK, why don’t we harness tidal power? We’re an island. The tide must be a great thing for us to use.

Speaker D: I think when we look at the more mature technologies or solutions for the renewables, so wind power, solar power, tidal now being investigated, I think all options are open now and they start to become a little bit more relevant given the new demands that we’re seeing. You know, previously we were providing the energy into the grid grid from these renewable sources because we knew for the business as usual, we need to run the economy, the society, and the hospitals and everything else. Now that we start to see a new demand vector coming in, which is these very interesting data centers that we need to now distribute, I think with new demand, you know, we will see some new innovations as well to, to meet that demand. And I think all bets are on right now on what would be the right options and capabilities that would be required to support these data centers.

Speaker B: That was Asvar Aslam, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of the telecommunications giant Nokia, on the challenges that now face us as we enter the age of AI. You’ve been listening to Password on Resonance FM about the world’s dizzying AI future. Password was written and presented by me, Peter Warren, and produced by Blue Buffery and is a Future Intelligence production.

Speaker E: Thanks for listening and goodbye.

Speaker A: This program has been brought to you by Resonance FM. If you like what you heard, please support our work by making a donation at resonancefm.com/donate.