Data Center Special–Technical Trends in Data Center Cooling

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has released some interesting information on data centers. According to the IEA’s figure titled ‘Global trends in Internet traffic, data center workloads and data center energy use, 2010–2019’ shown hereafter as Fig. 1, if Internet traffic, data center workloads, and data center energy use in 2010 are each set to 1, they have multiplied by about 12.1, 7.5, and 1.0, respectively, in 2019. Here, Internet traffic refers to the amount of data sent and received on the line per unit time, data center workloads refer to the amount of processing load placed on the data center, and data center energy use refers to the total power consumption in the data center used by the information and communication technology (ICT) equipment itself and auxiliary equipment for air conditioning and lighting, etc. These data show that the work volume of data centers in 2019, inferred from Internet traffic and data center workloads, increased significantly compared with 2010, but the amount of energy required to handle this work volume remained unchanged.