“People have been predicting that the energy demand for computers and the internet will skyrocket for a long time…
If you were to take the expected growth in internet technologies since 2010 and assume that energy demand would follow, then you do get pretty scary numbers.
But energy demand did not follow in the same way. That’s because it was curbed by the huge efficiency gains we just looked at.
Between 2010 and 2018, global data centre compute increased by more than 550%. Yet energy use in data centres increased by just 6%.
This follows on from ‘Koomey’s Law’ — named after the researcher Jonathan Koomey — which describes the dramatic increase in computations you could carry out per unit of energy.”