BLACK & VEATCH
With data centre power consumption set to quadruple by 2030, AI is driving unprecedented infrastructure demands across energy, water and grid systems
icture a large data centre from 2014. At 10MW, it was considered substantial. Fast-forward to today, and that same facility likely wouldn’ t register as a rounding error on hyperscale campus plans.
AI workloads demonstrate fundamentally different behaviour patterns compared to traditional computing. Where standard servers typically cruise at 30-40 % capacity utilisation, machine learning algorithms drive processors to sustained peak performance levels around the clock. GPUs designed for AI training can consume 300-700 watts per chip compared to 150-200 watts for traditional server processors. All of this resulting heat generation requires more cooling capacity and demands entirely different approaches to thermal management, power delivery and facility design.
Phil Fischer, Client Executive in Black & Veatch’ s data centre and mission critical team, has watched this transformation accelerate beyond industry predictions.“ If we go back 10 years, something that was in the double digits of megawatts was considered a large data centre. So 10-50MW was an enormous campus,” he explains. Today, these facilities are dwarfed by hyperscale data centre campuses reaching“ 500MW to multiple gigawatts in size.”
50 August 2025