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AI’s volatile power demand is damaging its own data centers

Rapid swings in AI data centers’ power demands are straining vital equipment, causing batteries, generators and cooling systems to malfunction or wear out far sooner than expected.

As the AI boom accelerates, these technical problems suggest added costs and unforeseen reliability problems, with even a few minutes of lost uptime hitting data-center developers’ revenue. They come at a time when investors and lenders are already jittery about hyperscalers’ hundreds of billions of dollars of spending, amid growing concerns that these facilities could be depreciating much faster than estimated. 

The problems are also a potential source of wider instability in power grids that are already straining to keep the lights on.

“AI does create very unusual power demand,” said Amber Villegas-Williamson, principal consultant at the Uptime Institute in the UK, which advises electricity suppliers and data centers on standards and reliability. “It’s like over-revving your car wears out the engine faster than keeping a constant speed.”

Data centers have been around for decades, gulping down electricity while they ensure that everything from your favorite streaming show to your online grocery order functions smoothly. But facilities designed for AI computing are different because their demand is so large and swings much more dramatically. 

Power increments equivalent to the consumption of factories, towns or even cities can appear and disappear within seconds, creating repeated shocks that connected equipment struggles to absorb. 

A gigawatt data center is equivalent to a city the size of Boston, half of which can flicker on and off every few seconds, said Shannon Miller, founder and president of Mainspring Energy Inc., which works on micro-grid projects for industrial and data-center customers. Some AI campuses planned in Texas, the Midwest and other........

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