Processing Cycles

To quote a modern-day pop poet who has serious trouble avoiding hand injuries: Man, it’s a hot one.

Over the last week or two, the heat on the East Coast has been utterly sweltering with seemingly no end in sight. Often, times of high heat lead to heavy air conditioning use, which causes costs to skyrocket.

So it’s likely that, if you were focused on the heat, you missed this data point. But recently, a data-reporting arm of the U.S. government projected that the biggest energy suck in commercial buildings may soon stop being the HVAC.

Instead, the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Annual Energy Outlook 2025 reported that computing is on track to outpace different forms of temperature regulation as the highest commercial energy consumers, sucking up nearly 350 billion kilowatt-hours by 2050. The report finds that computing costs are already on track to top 100 billion kilowatt-hours, surpassing refrigeration costs, in just a couple of years.

But the real story is what happens after. See, space cooling and ventilation are expected to eat up more energy in the coming years, likely to cool down all those server farms, but computing is expected to more than triple over a period of roughly a quarter-century.

Per an EIA blog post summarizing the findings:

We expect commercial computing growth will outpace computing efficiency improvements which, in the past, have moderated the growth in electricity consumption associated with computers. Commercial computing electricity demand growth is significant enough in our projections to contribute to a reversal in the trend in declining commercial electricity intensity, as measured in kilowatt-hours consumed per square foot.

Now, if you’re someone who has, for example, found a reason to complain about what’s happening in Memphis with the Grok data center, you may think that this is a result of AI driving things out of whack. But the interesting thing is that the EIA’s Courtney Sourmehi says that AI or other emerging trends weren’t really a factor in the projections.

“We make no additional assumptions about revolutionary technologies such as the accelerating expansion of highly energy-intensive artificial intelligence (AI) or, conversely, initiatives that may moderate the energy consumption of data centers generally or AI specifically,” she writes.

Rather, this report just focuses on the increased need for data centers, especially in healthcare and in large offices. Put another way, we are still seeing the impact of both cloud computing and server rooms on our overall computing footprint.

We’re using a crap-ton of data, so much that a nonpartisan research arm of the federal government focused on energy consumption is sounding the alarm. It’s telling us that we’re about to see it become a bigger part of a standard office’s energy bill than friggin’ HVAC.

And granted, technology is improving. More efficient processors, like those made by ARM, are likely to make data-heavy workloads a little less hefty from a computing standpoint. But on the other hand, high-powered GPUs are becoming a more essential part of your average data center–something Nvidia is benefiting from greatly on the stock market. Plus, the recent popularity of solid-state drives sort of papers over the fact that SSDs tend to consume more power than the hard drives we replaced.

An analysis by the B2B publication Solved Magazine found that SSDs can use up to 20 watts of power during aggressive writes, while hard drives tend not to top 10 watts. That may not sound like much (the magazine admittedly wasn’t impressed) but all those SSD drives add up at scale.

Of course, all that added energy consumption adds up to more heat, which adds up to a need for more ventilation and space cooling. A vicious cycle if you’ve ever seen one.

If there’s a silver lining to be taken from this, it’s that there is potential to change the bigger picture through the use of technology. The proof is in the lighting. The same report finds that lighting energy consumption is currently in the midst of a significant dip and may soon near the energy consumption costs related to refrigeration. All those LED light bulbs add up in a big way.

And it’s entirely possible that, as awareness of more energy-efficient ways to run a server room become commonplace, you may not necessarily be quite so upset about the wasted energy.

There’s still room for those server rooms to turn it around and not become the biggest bill in your office park. But it’s going to require some important tech to get serious about energy consumption. (Looking at you, Nvidia.)