Cloud giant Google has reported that it is using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to reduce its data center cooling costs, leveraging the “DeepMind” AI platform it acquired from British artificial intelligence company DeepMind Technologies in 2014 to do so.
DeepMind is famed for beating South Korean Go champion Lee Se-dol earlier this year – something analysts suggested might take AI at least another decade to achieve. DeepMind has been tied to a range of activity - not least the fight against cancer - but Google now suggests DeepMind can reduce data center energy usage, citing DeepMind reducing cooling costs at its data centers by 40%.
Google’s use of DeepMind to impact energy costs is in line with its global energy strategy – the company purchases more renewable energy (wind, solar, etc.) than any other company. It has also made considerable investments in global renewable energy projects. “Reducing energy usage has been a major focus for us over the past 10 years: we have built our own super-efficient servers at Google, invented more efficient ways to cool our data centers and invested heavily in green energy sources, with the goal of being powered 100 percent by renewable energy,” explained Google’s ‘Deepmind’ blog. “Compared to five years ago, we now get around 3.5 times the computing power out of the same amount of energy, and we continue to make many improvements each year,” it added.
Data center cooling requires industrial-scale equipment such as pumps, chillers and cooling towers, and it is a notoriously energy-hungry process. Over the last two years Google’s researchers applied DeepMind’s ‘neural network’-based algorithm to maximize its data centers’ efficiency and reduce costs. DeepMind used data such as pump speeds and temperatures collected by sensors to enhance Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE).
“Our machine learning system was able to consistently achieve a 40 percent reduction in the amount of energy used for cooling, which equates to a 15 percent reduction in overall PUE after accounting for electrical losses and other non-cooling inefficiencies. It also produced the lowest PUE the site had ever seen,” added the blog.
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