AI Is Heating the Olympic Pool | EUROtoday

In the suburbs of northeast Paris, there’s a big terra-cotta-colored warehouse with a labyrinth of windowless corridors inside. A deafening whir emanates from behind rows and rows of nameless grey doorways, and underneath white striplights, disposable earbuds can be found to guard passersby from the noise.

These are the uncanny innards of one among France’s latest information facilities, accomplished earlier this 12 months, which is now getting used to warmth the brand new Olympic Aquatics Center—seen from the info middle’s roof. When US swimming star Katie Ledecky gained her ninth Olympic gold medal final week, she did it by dashing via water heated, at the least partly, by the info middle’s equipment.

Known as PA10, this noisy web site belongs to the American information middle firm Equinix—the whirring sound is the corporate’s cooling programs making an attempt to decrease the temperature of its purchasers’ laptop servers. “PA10 is especially made for high-density racks,” says the positioning’s information middle engineer Imane Erraji, pointing to a tower of servers able to coaching AI.

For the previous month, the info middle has turned its scorching air waste into water and piped it to an area vitality system run by French utility firm Engie. Once it runs at full capability, Equinix expects to export 6.6 thermal megawatts of warmth out of the constructing—the equal of greater than 1,000 houses.

As projections counsel AI is about to turbocharge the quantity of electrical energy information facilities want—Equinix predicts energy consumption per rack may rise by as a lot as 400 %—PA10 displays a European phenomenon whereby officers try to mitigate the environmental affect of the approaching AI vitality crunch and rework information facilities into a part of the infrastructure preserving cities heat.

Erraji describes the venture as a “win-win situation” for each Equinix and the native suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis. Equinix can pipe the warmth out of the constructing so its cooling units don’t must work so exhausting, she explains, whereas the town will get an affordable supply of warmth produced regionally. After the venture obtained a €2 million ($2.1 million) funding from the town of Paris, Equinix has dedicated to offering the vitality free-of-charge for 15 years. In June, the mayor of Seine-Saint-Denis, Mathieu Hanotin, additionally known as consideration to the environmental advantages, claiming that utilizing the info middle as an vitality supply will spare the area 1,800 metric tons of CO₂ emissions per 12 months.

Yet France has a “very low-carbon electricity mix,” in line with the International Energy Agency (IEA), with 62 % of its electrical energy generated by nuclear energy. And critics say multiplying heat-reuse initiatives are a distraction from the actual problem: the quantity of land, water, and electrical energy information facilities devour. “When the data centers are already here, of course it’s better to reuse the heat than do nothing,” says Anne-Laure Ligozat, laptop science professor at France’s National School of Computer Science for Industry and Business (ENSIIE). “But the problem is the number of data centers and their energy consumption.” There can be much less of an environmental affect to to have a primary electrical energy heating system with out the info middle, she provides.