Artificial intelligence has been considered to be the most exciting development in tech since the internet. But it comes at a huge cost in terms of higher energy consumption.
That's why one engineer is working on ways to use the ocean’s renewable energy to eventually store and compute data underwater.
"What we actually do is we’ll deploy and maintain these data centers for economic and environmental benefits, and it's fairly cost effective in the way that we’re doing it," Maxie Reynolds, CEO of Subsea Cloud, told Yahoo Finance on Monday.
Data centers are physical locations with thousands of processing units and servers. They are at the core of the cloud computing industry largely managed by Google (GOOGL, GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), and Amazon (AMZN).
Reynolds's startup focuses on building, deploying, and maintaining subsea data centers. She says they are currently in the developmental stage with locations in the North Sea, off the coasts of New Zealand and Malaysia.
The idea of putting them underwater is aimed at reducing the amount of energy these structures consume, and reducing data latency, the length of time it takes for information to be transferred from one location to another.
“By placing them underwater you eliminate the electrically driven cooling and see we see about a 40% reduction in the power that’s consumed,” said Reynolds.
The concept is still in its early stages. Microsoft tested it in 2018. The tech giant spent an estimated $25 million on Project Natick. It involved sinking a capsule with servers and other IT equipment off the coast of Scotland, and successfully retrieving it.
The company recently told Yahoo Finance, “While we don’t currently have data centers in the water, we will continue to use Project Natick as a research platform to explore, test, and validate new concepts around datacenter reliability and sustainability.”
Industry experts agree data usage, which is steadily rising around the world, is driving the need for more ecological energy solutions. One estimate shows the industry's energy consumption is up 25% annually from 2015 to 2021, before the AI boom. That's why the industry’s biggest players, which include Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, are taking the lead with investing in renewable energy and making net zero pledges, meaning they aim to remove as much carbon as they emit.
“These things are important because as the AI workloads increase the need for power increases. The need for renewable energy increase. There’s so much that needs to be done to make sure these data centers are far more efficient than before because I think that’s going to be a big cost for these companies, both in the long and short run,” Anurag Rana, Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst, told Yahoo Finance on Monday.
Those investments are likely to drive smaller companies to migrate their data needs to the biggest cloud providers, bringing down costs and energy consumption. Rana predicts such a shift over the next decade.
“There is no logical reason in our view why a company should own and maintain their own data centers," Rana said.
Ines Ferre is a senior business reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter at @ines_ferre.
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