Northern Virginia’s blistering summer heat saw Data Center Alley’s electricity consumption surge even higher than usual.

Like people blasting their air conditioning, the building-size systems powering the modern internet need to stay cool to run smoothly. Climate control accounts for a large portion of the energy used by data centers in general, said Johns Hopkins University electrical and computing professor Yury Dvorkin.

Yury Dvorkin

“They go on top of what our existing baseline consumption is,” Dvorkin said. “It creates an additional energy demand in the form of electricity that has never been served before.”

As they continue to build server farms, developers in Virginia — which has the largest data center market in the world, comprising more than 300 with a massive concentration in Loudoun County’s self-named Data Center Alley — have asked utility provider Dominion Energy for nuclear reactors to boost grid capacity.

On average, data centers use roughly one kilowatt of power per square meter, Dvorkin said, similar to the use of a standard kettle to boil water. But while the kettle consumes energy at this level for a few minutes, he said, the data center buildings, which can be thousands of square meters each, consume energy 24/7.

With this constant requirement, data centers now account for about 2% of total US electricity use — and growing. The increasing popularity of generative artificial intelligence has become a major factor in this demand: a ChatGPT query requires 10 times as much electricity than a traditional Google search, per the Electric Power Research Institute.

Several researchers and companies are working on ways to make data center cooling more efficient.

At Virginia Tech, mechanical engineering professor Jonathan Boreyko and team are experimenting with materials that optimize heat transfer via “jumping bubbles” created by boiling water. The bubbles are used to carry energy and heat away, he said, and can be used to control temperatures in large-scale buildings like data centers or nuclear power plants.

“The goal is to simultaneously reduce the energy requirement for cooling,” Boreyko told Technical.ly, “while enabling a sufficient degree of cooling.”

This is an excerpt from an article written by Kaela Roeder for Technical.ly. You can read the rest of the article by clicking here.