Data centers are the backbone of the digital world, they are responsible for 1% of world’s electricity use. Good news though – all hyperscalers (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) have worked hard to make them as efficient as possible.
As recent a research paper found out, between 2010 and 2019 the computational capacity of data centres grew by 600 %, the electricity consumption only by 6%.
Google leads the pack, relying on efficiency gains from improved chips with finer manufacturing processes. CPUs are faster thanks to additional computing cores, GPU accelerators have more shader units, and new specialised ASICs perform mono-tasks (training deep learning networks) in a particularly energy-saving manner.