Managing energy, water constraints critical to Australia's AI ambitions

Australian policymakers are being urged to take a more sophisticated approach to regulating data centre efficiency as the country prepares for a significant increase in electricity demand.

This is the view of Matt Oostveen, Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, APJ for Everpure.

Talking exclusively to TechDay, in the lead up to Everpure's "ANZ Accelerate" conference in Melbourne on September 30, Oostveen suggested that Australia's federal and state governments should look beyond the energy performance of facilities and focus on the technology operating inside them.

They should also consider the broader implications for the nation's economy, technological development and data sovereignty, he said.

As forecasts point to a sharp rise in electricity consumption, the debate around the construction of new data centres needs to be one of balance - considering the amount of power and water they consume, and the positive economic benefits to the nation.

Australian stakeholders need to understand why the infrastructure is being built in the first place, he outlined.

"Australia is water constrained. It is power constrained, but we need to understand why we're making these things and what the purpose is behind it," Oostveen said.

The economic opportunity created by the infrastructure extends far beyond the facility itself.

"The employment opportunity isn't inside the facility," he said.

"There are some jobs in there for tech workers, but this is about the broader Australian economy. This is about us participating in an international AI revolution and being a player there."

The growth of AI and increasingly data-intensive technologies has accelerated demand for computing and storage infrastructure around the world.

For Australia, the expansion of local data centres is also being driven by the need to retain greater control over sensitive information.

Data sovereignty is one of the major reasons behind the shift.

"Geopolitics has changed," Oostveen said, noting that Australian companies are increasingly questioning who ultimately has jurisdiction over the data has stored on cloud infrastructure, particularly where providers were headquartered in foreign countries.

If a foreign court has jurisdiction over data stored in an Australian data centre, that raises question marks over sovereignty.

Industries including healthcare, government and financial services have particularly strong reasons to consider where sensitive information was stored, and which legal systems could potentially apply to it.

Australia's growing data requirements are also being shaped by 'data gravity' - the increasing cost and complexity of moving vast volumes of information between systems and jurisdictions.

As businesses place data at the centre of their technology architectures, applications, AI systems and other computing resources are increasingly being brought closer to where that information is stored.

"That new data-centric world is starting to emerge," Oostveen said.

"Where are we going to keep the data? We're going to put it inside data centres."

But Australia needs to ensure the expansion of the sector doesn't place unnecessary strain on electricity and water infrastructure.

Recent forecasts have raised concerns about the rapid growth in power demand from data centres, with some projections suggesting the sector's share of electricity consumption could rise significantly over the next decade.

The debate, however, should not simply focus on whether new power generation or new data centres were required. Policymakers should also examine opportunities to reduce the energy consumption of the technology deployed inside those facilities.

Everpure estimates that storage infrastructure accounts for approximately 20–25 per cent of the energy consumed within a data centre.

Much of that infrastructure continues to rely on mechanical hard drives, creating an opportunity to significantly reduce energy consumption through denser and more efficient storage technologies.

"If Australian data centres were to switch to technology as dense as ours, you could shrink that 25 per cent number to around two per cent," Oostveen said.

"Rather than building new energy stations, rather than having to construct new data centres, because there's also a smaller footprint that's contained in such dense materials, we can probably be driving a 10-times improvement just on that storage layer alone."

Existing approaches to data centre efficiency have been too heavily focused on high-level measurements of an entire facility.

Metrics such as power usage effectiveness, or PUE, remained useful for assessing overall performance, but regulators should also examine the efficiency of the servers, storage and other infrastructure operating on the data centre floor.

Oostveen cited Singapore, where he is currently based, as an example of a market where policymakers have begun taking a more detailed approach.

"Singapore is one of the few countries in the world that's actually mandating for the efficiency of the infrastructure that sits on that data centre floor," he said.

"Everyone else looks at it from a holistic perspective, but they are taking a bottom-up approach as well as a top-down approach."

Australia could adopt a similar model and establish standards that measure the amount of energy required to provide a certain amount of data storage.

We now have an opportunity to establish best practice through legislation, but the clock is ticking.

The aim should be to encourage data centre operators and technology suppliers to continually reduce the amount of energy required by underlying infrastructure rather than focusing on the overall energy consumption of an increasingly large facility.

Oostveen also highlighted what he described as increasingly negative rhetoric surrounding data centres.

Some public discussion risks presenting an incomplete picture of how the facilities operate and the benefits they could provide to Australia.

"Now is the time for cool, calm heads to cut through with facts and be able to explain to people exactly what these facilities are, how they work, and what to expect from them," he said.

"The benefits for younger Australians are profound. The benefits for the Australian economy are strong."