Analysis Cloud computing is one of the few areas of the technology industry that is showing continuous growth, even during the pandemic and the subsequent inflation-driven restraint on spending. Still, one thing that can hold back the cloud's inexorable expansion is finding the power for the infrastructure it depends on.
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Organizations' global spending on infrastructure services is now approaching $80 billion per quarter, as The Register recently reported, a 22 percent year-over-year increase. This growth is partly due to increased demand for AI services, which has seen an increase since generative AI came to prominence last year.
However, cloud services need technical pipes and plumbing to function: data centers full of equipment, plus networking, cooling and power distribution facilities that keep it all running. All of this can add up to hundreds of megawatts of power at some plants.
This power consumption is a concern amid ballooning demand for capacity. While customers may be able to provision a new virtual machine instance with a few mouse clicks, building a new data facility takes much longer, especially if available land is scarce, and in many places the necessary power infrastructure may not be there with utilities often struggling to to keep pace.
