BIG TECH needs extra computing energy. Much more. In line with their newest quarterly reviews, Alphabet (Google’s company mother or father), Amazon and Microsoft—the world’s cloud-computing giants—collectively invested $40bn between January and March, most of it in knowledge centres outfitted to take care of rising artificial-intelligence (AI) workloads. Final month Meta, which doesn’t have a cloud enterprise however does run a data-hungry social-media empire, stated its capital expenditure might attain $40bn this yr because of AI-related initiatives. That isn’t far off the $50bn that Saudi Aramco, an oil colossus, is planning to splurge. Microsoft is prone to spend extra.
The comparability with the famously capex-happy power business is apt not simply due to the sums concerned. AI wants huge quantities of processing energy. And that processing energy wants huge quantities of electrical energy. On Might 2nd Bob Blue, chief government of Dominion Power, one among America’s greatest utilities, stated that data-centre builders now usually ask him for “a number of gigawatts” (GW). Dominion’s whole put in capability is 34GW.
