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Microsoft discussed the growing energy demands of AI and the subsequent industry-wide shift toward sustainable practices in front of the Senate Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence held on 16 August in Parliament House.
Microsoft A/NZ managing director CEO Steve Worrall told the committee that while its energy consumption has increased, so had its use of renewable energy.
“We’re on track to meet our 2025 goal of powering all our Australian data centres with renewable energy,” he said. “We have 215-year power purchase agreements in place to support these data centre.”
Worrall shared to the committee, “that the energy usage differential” goes to the heart of both the challenge and the opportunity here.
He acknowledged that it was well documented that AI models and related services consume far more power than previous cloud services.
“This is one of the fundamental issues our industry needs to address moving forward. Microsoft has committed to being carbon-neutral and water-positive by 2030 as part of our sustainability strategy, and we’re on track to meet that goal,” he stated to the senate inquiry.
According to Worrall, this commitment was made in 2020 before the software giant fully understood the energy demands of these AI models.
“We’re adapting to these changes, both in Australia and globally,” he said. “By 2025, all of our data centres will be powered by renewable energy, which is crucial for fulfilling our commitment. The entire sector needs to consider similar approaches to power their data centers sustainably.”
According to Senator David Shoebridge, to get an idea of the scale, “Bloomberg recently analysed the number of data centres globally; the number has increased from 3,600 in 2015 to 7,000 by the end of last year”.
Additionally, data centres themselves have grown in size and energy demand, which according to Worrall was in line with growth of historical “technological revolutions”.
“We’ve seen similar patterns where governments and investors rush to build infrastructure in anticipation of future demands,” he added. “I expect a similar trajectory here, though it doesn’t diminish the concerns you’re raising. Over time, we’ll likely see a closer alignment between infrastructure development and the value it brings to the community.”