A Google logo at a data center exhibition ahead of the ceremonial opening of the Google Cloud data center in Hanau, Germany, Oct. 6, 2023.ABC News is taking a look at solutions for issues related to climate change and the environment with the series, “The Power of Us: People, The Climate, and Our Future.”and remote work – all of these buzzy trends depend on processing power delivered by a sprawling worldwide network of data centers.
In 2022, roughly 2,700 data centers in the U.S. accounted for over 4% of the nation's electricity use, according to anThe proportion of U.S. electricity use for data centers is expected to continue to climb in the ensuing years, the report said, citing anticipated broader adoption of AI and crypto. "If Nvidia keeps growing in the way they're hoping they'll grow and keeps selling in the way they're planning to, that's a fairly large increase in energy usage," Arman Shehabi, a staff scientist in energy technologies at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, told ABC News.