Big Tech’s appetite for energy is visible from the east coast of Scotland. About 19 kilometers offshore is a wind farm, where each of 60 giant turbines has blades about as long as an American football field. The utility companies behind the Moray West project had promised the site would be able to generate enough electricity to power 1.3 million homes once completed. This was before Amazon got involved.
In January, Amazon announced it had reached a deal to claim more than half of the site’s 880 megawatts of output, as part of its continuing attempt to quench its unquenchable thirst for electricity. As the world’s biggest companies race to build the infrastructure needed for artificial intelligence, even the most remote Scottish wind farms are becoming indispensable.
In Europe last year, $79.4 million was spent on new data center projects, according to research firm Global Data. Already in 2024, there are signs that demand is accelerating. Today, Microsoft announced a $3.2 billion bet on Swedish data centers. Earlier this year, the company also announced that it would double its data center footprint in Germany, while committing to invest $4.3 billion in data centers for AI infrastructure In France. Amazon announced a network of data centers in the state of Brandenburg as part of an $8.5 billion investment in Germany, then dedicated another $17.1 billion to Spain. Google announced it would spend $1.1 billion on its data center in Finland to drive AI growth.
As tech giants rush to build more data centers, panic reigns behind the scenes over how to power them. Microsoft, Meta and Google all plan to reach net zero emissions before 2030, while logistics-heavy Amazon is aiming for 2040. In pursuit of this goal, the last decade has seen these companies enter into renewable energy contracts with wind or solar companies. But all of these projects depend on power grids, which are collapsing in the face of growing demand for clean energy. This is forcing tech giants to think about their energy-intensive futures and consider how they might operate their own off-grid, outside-the-system energy empires.
“There is recognition that as energy demand increases, the industry will need to find alternative energy sources,” says Colm Shorten, senior director of data center strategy at property services company JLL, explaining that server farms are increasingly looking “behind-the-wire”, whether it’s gas or diesel generators or more innovative technologies such as green hydrogen.
Data centers need power for two main purposes. The first is to power the chips that allow computers to run algorithms or power video games. The second is to cool the servers, to prevent them from overheating and shutting down. Initiatives such as using liquid to cool the chips instead of air are expected to provide modest energy savings. But forecasts still predict that data center electricity demand could double by 2026, according to the International Energy Association, driven in part by the demands of artificial intelligence.
Over the past five years, technology companies have been on an increasingly frenzied buying spree for renewable contracts known as power purchase agreements (PPAs), which can allow operators to data centers to reserve energy from a wind farm or solar site before the projects are even completed. built. In Denmark there are solar farms financed by Meta. In Norway there are wind farms financed by Google. As early adopters of these types of agreements, technology companies have helped fuel Europe’s now thriving PPA market, says WindEurope spokesperson Christoph Zipf. This month, Microsoft closed the world’s largest renewable energy deal, signing a $10 billion clean energy deal in Europe and the United States.
Yet renewable energy still needs to pass through the electricity grid, which is becoming a bottleneck, particularly in Europe, as a growing number of renewable energy producers attempt to connect to meet transition demand green in a multitude of sectors. “We’re going to run into energy constraints,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted in a podcast in April. At Davos this year, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, also warned that the status quo would not be able to provide AI with the power it needs. we had to move forward. “There’s no way we’re going to get there without a breakthrough,” he said at a Bloomberg event.
