Rising concerns about cryptocurrency mining energy use have led the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) to launch a six-month emergency data reporting mandate (on January 26, 2024) to obtain information from 82 cryptocurrency mining companies. The emergency order which was approved by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) requires cryptocurrency miners to provide information detailing their monthly energy consumption, average and maximum electricity demand, energy suppliers, mining unit counts, and the hash rate (compute power of a blockchain network) at each of their operating loca ..read more

The idea of using liquids to cool IT hardware, exemplified by technologies such as cold plates and immersion cooling, is frequently hailed as the ultimate solution to the data center’s energy efficiency and sustainability challenges. If a data center replaces air cooling with direct liquid cooling (DLC), chilled water systems can operate at higher supply and return water temperatures, which are favorable for both year-round free cooling and waste heat recovery. Indeed, there are some larger DLC system installations that use only dry coolers for heat rejection, and a few installations are integ ..read more

Corporate data centers have been the backbone of enterprise IT since the 1960s and continue to play an essential role in supporting critical business and financial functions for much of the global economy. Yet, while their importance remains, their prominence as part of an enterprise’s digital infrastructure appears to be fading. Today, businesses have more options for where to house their IT workloads than ever before. Colocation, edge sites, the public cloud infrastructure and software as a service all offer a mature alternative to take on many, if not all, enterprise workloads. Findings fro ..read more

Uptime Institute calculates an industry average power usage effectiveness (PUE), which is a ratio of total site power to IT power, each year using data from the Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey. This PUE data is pulled from a large sample over the course of 15 years and provides a reliable view of progress in facility efficiency. Uptime’s data shows that industry PUE has remained at a high average (ranging from 1.55 to 1.59) since around 2020. Despite ongoing industry modernization, this overall PUE figure has remained almost static, in part because many older and less-efficient lega ..read more

For more than a decade, the data center industry — and the wider digital infrastructure that relies on it — has lived with the threat of much greater sustainability legislation or other forms of mandatory or semi-mandatory controls. But in a period of boom, it has mostly been a background worry, with legislators more concerned about disrupting an important new industry. The EU, for example, first introduced the voluntary Code of Conduct for data centers in 2008, warning that legislation would follow if carbon and energy footprints were not brought under control. In the UK, a carbon reduction c ..read more

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are expected to change the way work is done across numerous organizations and job roles. This is especially true for generative AI tools, which are capable of synthesizing new content based on patterns learned from existing data. This update explores the rise of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI. It examines whether data center managers should be as dismissive of this technology as many appear to be and considers whether generative AI will find a role in data center operations. This is the first in a series of reports on AI and its impact o ..read more

The suitability of a data center environment is primarily judged by its effect on the long-term health of IT hardware. Facility operators define their temperature and humidity set points with a view to balancing hardware failure rates against the associated capital and operational expenditures, with the former historically prioritized. Over the past decade, this balance has shifted in favor of facility efficiencies as data center operators have gradually lifted their temperature (and humidity) limits from a typical 65°F to 68°F (18°C to 20°C) to somewhere between 72°F and 77°F (22°C and 25°C ..read more

Regular readers of Uptime Institute’s annual data center survey, the longest running of its kind, already know that the industry average power usage effectiveness (PUE, a ratio of total site power and IT power) has trended sideways in recent years. Since 2020, it has been stuck in the 1.55 to 1.59 band. Even going back further, we would see only a trivial improvement in the headline number. For many data center industry watchers, including regulators, this flatlining has become a cause for concern — an apparent lack of advancement raises questions about operators’ commitment to energy performa ..read more

Over the past 12 months, Uptime Institute Intelligence has been closely following regulatory developments in the area of sustainability. These include mandates based on the Task force on Climate-related Financial Disclosure standard, such as the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the UK’s Climate-related Financial Disclosure Regulations, and the EU’s Energy Efficiency Directive. These legal frameworks mandate the collection and reporting of corporate and data center-level information on building type and location, energy use, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and operating metr ..read more

In recent reports, Uptime Institute Intelligence has warned that a wave of resiliency, security and sustainability legislation is making its way toward the statute books. Governments around the world — aware that digital infrastructure is increasingly critical to economic and national security (and consumes a lot of power) — have decided the sector cannot be left unwatched and unmanaged. New laws relating to data center sustainability have attracted the most attention, partly because some of the provisions will likely prove expensive or difficult to meet. In Germany, for example, the Energy Ef ..read more