Share of electricity consumption by data centre and equipment type, 2024
Digital Al depends on physical silicon, concrete and different ways. The key hardware systems that account for most electricity use in data centres include servers, cooling systems, storage and networking equipment, future Al data centres as designs are rapidly evolving. Servers are the core information technology (IT) infrastructure containing computer chips and memory, of Al models - training and inference. Traditionally, servers relied on central processing units (CPUs), which are designed for a wide range of computation have shifted towards using accelerated processors, mostly GPUs. These processors are designed to handle large volumes of parallel computations, which enables the model to process massive datasets in a shorter amount of time, generation of GPUs tends to be more efficient than the last, the total power draw per GPU still tends to be larger, as does the total number of GPUs per rack.