Ten years ago, power usage at data centers was growing at an unsustainable rate, soaring 24 percent from 2005 to 2010. But a shift to virtualization, cloud computing, and improved data center management is reducing energy demand.
According to a new study, data center energy use is expected to increase just 4 percent from 2014 to 2020, despite growing demand for computing resources.
Total data center electricity usage in the U.S., which includes powering servers, storage, networking, and the infrastructure to support it, was at 70 billion kWh (kilowatt hours) in 2014, representing 1.8 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption.
