Talking About Data Center AI Energy Use on Sky News

Tom Worthington, interviewed at Parliament House
on Sky News, 19 January 2024

This week I was interviewed at Parliament House for a news item on data centers and their expanding energy use ("Tech companies spending billions to meet data centre demand", Brent O'Halloran, Sky News 19 January 2024). 

There are boom times in Australia, and world wide for data centers. Microsoft alone is planning nine new data centers in Australia. One reason is AI increasing the computing capacity needed, which is also increasing the processing required at data center, and thus energy use.  therefore power needed.

One way around the power use problem is to collocate the data centers with big batteries, at transmission line nodes from renewable energy zones. I talked about this at a conference in Singapore last year. One example is the Brendale Supernode in Queensland.