Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently shared his thoughts about the growth and future of data centers that focus on the development of AI in an interview. According to him, the shortage of AI accelerator cards is in the process of being alleviated. He noted that it was a big issue over the last few years to get the GPUs that are key to the development of artificial intelligence models due to supply chain shortage. Now it is in the process of being alleviated.
The investment in data centers is still growing exponentially. For example, Chinese smartphone manufacture Meizu have lately shifted its focus from smartphone to the development of AI and is also likely building the infrastructure key to the development.
However, as more and more companies are starting to build their data centers and focus on AI development, the power requirement to run the data centers could become the next bottleneck.
He gave an idea of the power requirements of data centers. Currently, the overall power consumption of a newly built single data center can reach 50~100MW, or even 150MW. He believes that it will grow in the future and there could be single data centers with a power requirement of 300MW to even 1GW. For context, it is the equivalent generation capacity of a meaningful nuclear power plant.
On top of that, building new power plants and the transmission system is a “very heavily regulated government government function.” It means that approvals for the construction of supporting energy facilities (including power stations, substations, and power transmission systems) for large data centers will be slower and it could result in a bottleneck to the development of data centers.
In short, the energy industry is different from AI development, where capital investment cannot reap results in a short period of time, and the development of new power stations is much slower than the data center itself. Notably, digital infrastructure investment management company DigitalBridge also holds a similar view. It recently stated at its earnings conference that the company will run out of power quotas within the next 1.5 to 2 years.
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