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Australia's largest data centre operator says the AI boom has accelerated the land and energy challenges posed by the shift to cloud computing over the past decade.
NextDC operates a network of 15 The company plans to build four more data centres in Australia, with another four planned or in development, as part of a $10.3 billion business. The use of AI is driving rapid expansion, but with volatile energy prices amid global conflict and the shift to renewables, there’s “no doubt” this will put pressure on power grids, says David Dzenciol, chief customer and commercial officer.
AI is the “next big wave” for the data industry, says David Dzenciol, COO of NextDC.
“We will need to, collectively, look at all the alternatives to ensure we can handle the demand,” he says. The company’s chief executive, Craig Scroggie, has previously said that nuclear power should be considered to support greater computing power.
Australia’s data centres will consume about 5% of the country’s energy, or about 1,050 megawatts, in 2024 — equivalent to the entire consumption of South Australia — and that figure will rise to between 8% and 15% by 2030, according to research by Morgan Stanley. The Australian Energy Council says a large data centre can consume the same energy as 50,000 homes or a small town.
The industry is also facing high prices for industrial real estate in major hubs, with NextDC saying in 2021 it would pay $124 million for a site currently under planning at Horsley Park in Sydney. Dzienciol says the company is seeing “workloads start to move to the edge”: it has a site in Port Hedland and another under development in Newman in north-western Australia, and it just opened its first data center in Darwin.
Founded in May 2010, NextDC has been at the forefront of a decade of data moving from office server rooms to remotely accessible “cloud” storage with data center operators.
This month it announced it had received certification from US tech giant Nvidia to support Australian organisations using the company’s platforms, which use GPU (“graphics processing unit”) chips that have sent investors into a frenzy, earning Nvidia a key spot in the “Magnificent Seven” tech stocks.
The brute force of GPU computing, where hundreds or thousands of less powerful units run the same operations at high speed and volume, supports AI better than traditional CPU computing, whose more versatile, brain-like systems can switch between operations, but at lower volumes, Dzenshull said.
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