Germany has increasingly powerful data centers
The capacity of Germany's data centers increased by 84% in a decade, becoming more powerful, also increasing energy consumption
Germany’s data centers are getting more powerful, as their capacity grew by 84 percent between 2010 and 2020, measured by the maximum electricity consumption of installed hardware, the Borderstep institute in Berlin reported today. Energy consumption also increased, although not at the same rate because the energy efficiency of equipment improved, according to the main results of the Borderstep study, commissioned by the digital association Bitkom.
The energy demand of the data processing centers in Germany grew in those ten years from 10.5 billion to 16 billion kilowatt hours, which meant an increase of 52.4 percent. In this way, the energy demand of these centers represented in 2020 0.6 percent of the total energy consumption of Germany.
According to the study, greenhouse gas emissions caused by the country’s smaller data centers and computing facilities have decreased since 2018. With nearly six million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), in 2020 they returned to the same 2010 level.
Climate neutrality
“Data center operators support the government’s goal, which foresees climate neutrality for all new data centers in Germany from 2027,” said Bitkom CEO Bernhard Rohleder. “However, this can only be successful if enough electricity is available from renewable sources,” he noted.
The report indicates that it was not just the number of facilities and the number of servers and network components installed there that grew. According to Borderstep calculations, installed computing capacity in data centers has increased nearly fivefold per kilowatt hour of electricity consumed since 2010. The increase in capabilities is mainly explained by the growth of cloud computing. More and more companies are no longer running their own data center, but are instead drawing storage space and computing power from the Internet.
The Borderstep study defines a data center as one that comprises at least ten “racks” or cabinets of servers or has a connected load of more than 40 kilowatt hours. The smallest IT facilities, with individual server racks and the smallest server rooms, are not considered data centers in the strict sense.
According to the report, there are around 3,000 data centers and around 47,000 smaller computing facilities in Germany.
Source: dpa
