The financial services biz estimates the current total power consumed by the global datacenter industry is around 55 GW. More than half of this (54 percent) pertains to cloud computing workloads, with traditional business functions including email or storage making up 32 percent, and AI workloads 14 percent.
By modeling future demand for each of these types of workload, the projections are for power requirements to reach 84 GW by 2027, with AI expanding to comprise 27 percent of this, while cloud makes up half and traditional functions 23 percent.
If accurate, this will mean that power consumed by all those data facilities is set to increase by 50 percent in just a couple of years, and Goldman Sachs expects the trend to continue, with about 122 GW of total datacenter capacity online by the end of 2030.
Poster Comment:
We need more natural gas. We could use a second pipeline from the NorthSlope of Alaska if economically feasible.