Google: Our data centers are now twice as energy-efficient as a typical enterprise facility

Google LLC has revealed that, thanks to innovations such as its Tensor Processing Unit artificial intelligence chips, its data centers are twice as energy-efficient as the typical enterprise data center. Urs Hölzle, the head of engineering for Google Cloud, shared the milestone in a blog post today. The announcement was timed to coincide with a new paper published in the academic journal Science about the power consumption of the world’s information technology infrastructure. The paper, co-authored by Stanford professor Jonathan Koomey, examines data centers’ electricity usage from 2010 to 2018. The key finding is that data centers’ power consumption rose only 6% in the eight-year period even as the amount of computing done in those facilities soared 550%. As a result, IT infrastructure accounts for about 1% of global electricity consumption, roughly the same proportion as in 2010.