The demand for datacenter services has grown every year and is expected to grow significantly in the coming years. This increased use is, amongst other uses, driven by the growth of AI solutions, Smart Industry developments, introduction of 5G technology, intensified working from home, online shopping and streaming services.
The energy usage of datacenters has grown alongside rising demand, though efficiency improvements have partly offset this growth. All the electricity a datacenter uses ultimately becomes heat; today, most of this waste heat isn’t captured for reuse and operations often aren’t optimized to reduce it. With cooling systems already close to their efficiency limits, the greatest opportunities now lie in reusing waste heat, advancing hardware design, and optimizing datacenter operations.
Europe’s decarbonisation will only work if electrification and digitalisation advance together; securely, efficiently, and with system-level resilience as a first-order design constraint. The macro picture has shifted from a “green premium” logic to a security premium: supply-chain, cyber, and grid resilience now set the pace and where investments flow. That shift will re-accelerate clean electrification, but only if our digital infrastructure cuts energy per operation and is secure-by-design.
Reducing energy consumption
The Energy Efficient Computing, Communications & Sensing coalition focuses on cutting the energy needed for each task computers and networks perform in our increasingly digitalized world. With our top researchers in the field of new materials, AI solutions and stochastic operations, photonics and neuromorphic computing, this programme strives to reduce the energy need of data management. We want to achieve this by both improving current technologies to reduce the energy demand of datacenters, using heat regeneration technologies and AI solutions to optimize energy consumption, and by looking at new technologies for data processing which simultaneously optimize for meeting service and quality demands while reducing energy consumption.
UT offers end-to-end capability from materials and devices to algorithms and integrated systems:
- materials and device physics and brain-inspired hardware
- to edge/cloud systems, networks and AI
- to grid-interactive operation and societal adoption
Involved researchers
National coalition sustainable digitalisation
The low-energy datacenter programme is part of the National Coalition Sustainable Digitalisation (Nationale Coalitie Duurzame Digitalisering).