From the east coast of Scotland, the energy appetite of big tech companies is almost visible. About 12 miles offshore, the wind farm sits, with 60 giant turbines, each with blades the length of a football field. The power company behind the Moray West project promised that when complete, the facility would have enough power to power 1.3 million homes. And that was before Amazon got involved.
Amazon announced in January that it had signed a deal to take over half of the facility’s 880 megawatts of output, part of the company’s ongoing efforts to meet its insatiable power needs. As the world’s largest companies race to build the infrastructure needed to enable artificial intelligence, the remote Scottish wind farm is also becoming essential.
According to research firm GlobalData, $79.4 million was spent on new data center projects in Europe last year. For 2024, there are already signs of accelerating demand. Microsoft said today it would invest $3.2 billion in data centers in Sweden. The company said earlier this year it would double its data center footprint in Germany and committed $4.3 billion in data center investments in French AI infrastructure. Amazon announced a data center network in Brandenburg as part of its $8.5 billion investment in Germany, and later invested another $17.1 billion in Spain. Google said it would invest $1.1 billion in data centers in Finland to fuel its AI growth.
As tech giants rush to build data centers, behind the scenes there’s panic over how to power them. Microsoft, Meta, and Google all plan to be net-zero by 2030, with logistics-focused Amazon targeting 2040. To get there, over the past decade the companies have been signing renewable energy contracts with wind and solar companies. But all these projects rely on the power grid, which is collapsing under rising demand for clean energy. That’s forcing the tech giants to think about their energy-intensive future and how to run their own off-grid power empires outside the power grid.
“As demand for electricity increases, there is a recognition that the industry has to find alternative sources of energy,” said Colm Shorten, senior director of data centre strategy at real estate services firm JLL, explaining that server farms are increasingly looking for “behind the wire” power supplies, such as gas or diesel generators or more innovative technologies such as green hydrogen.
Data centers need electricity for two main purposes. The first is to power the chips that computers use to run algorithms and power video games. The second is to cool the servers, preventing them from overheating and shutting down. Efforts such as using liquids instead of air to cool chips have promised modest energy savings. But data center electricity demand is expected to double by 2026, thanks in part to the demand for artificial intelligence, according to the International Energy Association.
Over the past five years, technology companies have become increasingly frantic in shopping around for renewable energy contracts, known as power purchase agreements (PPAs), which allow data center operators to reserve power before wind and solar farms are built. In Denmark there are solar farms funded by Meta; in Norway there are wind farms funded by Google. As early adopters of such deals, technology companies have helped fuel Europe’s now-booming PPA market, according to WindEurope spokesman Christoph Zipf. This month, Microsoft inked a $10 billion deal to supply clean electricity across Europe and the U.S., the world’s largest renewable energy deal.
But renewable energy still needs to go through the power grid, which is becoming a bottleneck. Especially in Europe, where renewable energy producers are proliferating and trying to connect to meet the demands of the green transition in various sectors. “We’re going to be energy constrained,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted in a podcast in April. At Davos this year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also warned that the status quo won’t provide the power needed for AI advances. “There’s no way to get there without breakthroughs,” Altman said at the Bloomberg event.
