Data centers’ increasing power consumption is straining the grid, with AI servers accounting for an ever larger share of that consumption, with further increases forecast. These demands are leading to a growing number of protests against the development of data centers, which could lead to construction delays.
OpenAI claims that its Grid Protectors Program will meet some of those issues head-on by taking into account future capacity needs and working to make power flexibility a key element in data center, sorry, compute campus, design. The company said that the approach would differ, region by region. It has yet to finalize all the details of the scheme, but it hopes to head off some of the protests. It remains to be seen whether it has this effect.
Google recently took the opposite approach to the peak consumption problem, proposing to pay people to turn off their appliances at times of high demand so that it can continue to power its data centers.
This story originally appeared on Computerworld
