AI Is Heating the Olympic Pool

Within the suburbs of northeast Paris there’s a big terracotta-colored warehouse, with a labyrinth of windowless corridors inside. A deafening whir emanates from behind rows and rows of nameless grey doorways and underneath white strip lights, disposable earbuds can be found to guard passers-by from the noise.

These are the uncanny innards of one in every of France’s latest knowledge facilities, accomplished earlier this yr, which is now getting used to warmth the brand new Olympic Aquatics Center—seen from the info heart’s roof. When US swimming star Katie Ledecky gained her ninth Olympic gold medal final week, she did it by rushing by water heated, a minimum of partly, by the info heart’s equipment.

Referred to as PA10, this noisy web site belongs to the American knowledge heart firm Equinix—the whirring sound is the corporate’s cooling techniques making an attempt to decrease the temperature of its shoppers’ pc servers. “PA10 is very made for prime density racks,” says the positioning’s knowledge heart engineer Imane Erraji, pointing to a tower of servers able to coaching AI.

For the previous month, the info heart has turned its scorching air waste into water and piped it to an area power system run by French utility firm Engie. As soon as it runs at full capability, Equinix expects to export 6.6 thermal megawatts of warmth out of the constructing—the equal of greater than 1,000 properties.

As projections recommend AI is about to turbocharge the quantity of electrical energy knowledge facilities want—Equinix predicts energy consumption per rack may rise by as a lot as 400 %—PA10 displays a European phenomenon whereby officers try and mitigate the environmental impression of the coming AI energy crunch and remodel knowledge facilities into a part of the infrastructure maintaining cities heat.

Erraji describes the undertaking as a “win-win scenario” for each Equinix and the native suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis. Equinix can pipe the warmth out of the constructing so its cooling units don’t must work so laborious, she explains, whereas the town will get an affordable supply of warmth produced domestically. After the undertaking acquired a €2 million ($2.1m) funding from the town of Paris, Equinix has dedicated to offering the power free-of-charge for 15 years. In June, mayor of Seine-Saint-Denis, Mathieu Hanotin, also called attention to the environmental advantages, claiming that utilizing the info heart as an power supply will spare the area 1,800 tonnes of CO2 emissions per yr.

But France has a “very low-carbon electrical energy combine,” based on the Worldwide Vitality Company (IEA), with 62 percent of its electrical energy generated by nuclear energy. And critics say multiplying heat-reuse initiatives are a distraction from the actual challenge: the quantity of land, water and electrical energy knowledge facilities eat. “When the info facilities are already right here, in fact it is higher to reuse the warmth than do nothing,” says Anne-Laure Ligozat, pc science professor at France’s Nationwide College of Pc Science for Business and Enterprise (ENSIIE.) “However the issue is the variety of knowledge facilities and their power consumption.” There can be much less of an environmental impression to to have a fundamental electrical energy heating system with out the info heart, she provides.