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Frontier, the world’s highest-performing supercomputer, consumes 8 M.W. and 30 M.W. of electricity, depending on the workload. However, the upcoming AI data center is estimated to consume much more. India-based Reliance is set to build a 1 GWh (one-gigawatt hour) data center for AI that will run Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs, Reuters reports.
“In the future, India is going to be the country that will export AI,” said Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, according to Reuters. “You have the fundamental ingredients – AI, data and AI infrastructure, and you have a large population of users.”
The story does not disclose the data center’s specifications or compute capability, perhaps for competitive reasons. Yet, one could potentially estimate D.C.’s performance based on the power consumption of Nvidia’s reference NVL36 and NVL72 Blackwell-based machines and their cooling requirements. We would, however, focus only on its power consumption.
While this might be the world’s first gigawatt-class data center fully dedicated to AI training, modern data centers for commercial workloads consume considerably more power than leading-edge supercomputers. For example, Meta’s campus in Prineville, Oregon, was the largest electricity consumer, using 1.375 GWh, for the company in 2023, according to the company’s sustainability report. This data center is used for various workloads, followed by Altoona, Iowa, which consumed 1.243 GWh, and Sarpy, Nebraska, at 1.148 GWh. While we cannot say that all of these data centers are used for both AI training and typical Facebook workloads, it is evident that they are not used for one purpose only.
These Gigawatt-class data centers are built in the U.S. Yet, Microsoft’s Azure admits that for its next-generation AI data centers in America, the capability of the U.S. power grid could be a limiting factor as their power consumption is increasing fast. To supply power to its data centers, Microsoft plans to restart nuclear power plants, and its peers from the cloud business, like AWS and Oracle, intend to do the same.
Whether India’s power grid is ready for a gigawatt-class data center remains to be seen. According to MercomIndia, all of India’s data centers will consume around 193 GW in 2024, but there are thousands of them in the country, so it really remains to be seen how this 1 G.W. data center will be powered. Then again, an announcement from two big companies means that there is a plan behind this major data center.
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