The simple fact is, we do not have enough power for the AI future we anticipate and the power supply we do have is subject to a zero-sum game with everything else that needs electricity.

Information technology is possibly the fastest growing demand centre for power today, and it is projected to triple in the next decade. Satisfying this hunger will require innovation on the power supply side, on transmission and at the level of servers and chips themselves.

We will need more power generation – ideally of the renewable variety – better and more ubiquitous power transmission to get that energy where it needs to go, and we need far better technology to reduce the amount of energy waste at data centres.

Innovation, by itself, cannot bridge the gap – much of the challenge relates to regulation and political will to build more generation and transmission – but there is plenty of space for innovation to improve how we use what we currently have more effectively. New generation technologies can make the power ‘cleaner’, existing transmission lines can be retrofitted with more conductive materials, better batteries can store more energy or release it faster to optimise energy use, better cooling mechanisms can reduce the energy getting wasted through heat, and new materials technologies, such as optics, can make data transfer faster and more energy efficient.

This report will look at four main areas where progress is being made, and where it can also improve: generation; transmission; behind-the-meter; and efficiency in facility.

It will also include three case studies, each on a startup tackling an issue of energy efficiency in data centres, namely: power management (Skeleton Technologies); cooling (ZutaCore); and data transfer (Lightium). Each of these represent opportunities to significantly reduce the amount of power that data centres will need to carry out the same function.

Finally, there is a watchlist of startups that are taking important strides to fix hard-to-abate problems that will, if all goes well, have a significant effect on how data centres consume power.