[News Today] AS AI GROWS DATA CENTERS TO CUT ENERGY USE

[LEAD]
The AI industry booming all around the world, leading to an increase in data centers that handle massive amounts of data at a swift pace. The issue at hand is power consumption. Data processing requires huge amount of electricity, which has made reducing power usage one of the biggest challenges for IT companies.

[REPORT]
A communications service provider's data center where the servers are located.

It's always noisy in here.

The air conditioning system is kept on around the clock...
to cool the data-processing servers and IT equipment that produces immense amount of heat.

The servers can shut down if they're overheated, so the temperature must be kept at an optimum level all the time.

But all this cooling requires a lot of energy.

About half of the power consumed in the data center is used for cooling.

Prompted by the skyrocketing energy cost..
IT companies are driven to cut down electricity usage.

A new technology called immersion cooling was developed recently. It refers to cooling a server by submerging it in a cooling oil.

Choi Woo-shin/ SK Telecom
We can save a lot of energy, more than 30%, because the energy needed
to make cold water is saved.

Microsoft had experimented building an underwater data center...
and Google uses AI to monitor energy use and control its power consumption more efficiently.

Song Joon-hwa/ Director, Korea Data Center Efficiency Assn.
They're trying to reduce the amount of energy wasted by the air conditioning
system and energy supply system.

There are currently about 150 data centers nationwide.
The number is likely to increase to roughly 1,500 by 2033.

Energy efficiency will become even more important if power-guzzling AI services become more commonplace.

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