Cloud Computing and the Energy Crisis

Do you know how much computing takes place on the cloud??Needless to stay, it is considerable. Big name companies that provide computing cloud services have amassed over a quarter of a trillion dollars last year alone. This is why big name technology companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon maintain and operate massive data centers across the globe.?Apple and Facebook also run a similar type of data center, stacked sky-high with high-core-count CPU, that support limitless terabytes of RAM and petabytes of storage.?

These are the machines that are doing all the heavy lifting in what has become called surveillance capitalism. Which is the endless tracking, monitoring, user profiling and algorithmic targeting that goes into advertising today. Bloomberg has recently estimated that 1% of the world's electricity is going to cloud computing alone.??

And this figure is set to explode to higher numbers over the next decade. According to Bloomberg, we may end the 2020’s with a need for about 8% of the world’s power just for cloud computing. This may seem like an exaggeration but in all reality, it is a conservative estimate. When one considers that by 2030, there will be hundreds of millions more augmented reality devices streaming video into the cloud in real life as well as the widespread use of digital currencies that will seamlessly combine cash into code. This means that the cloud will soon become the foundation for every financial and data transaction on the planet.??

So the big question we have now is, how much more energy can we dedicate to this computing? At an earlier time, we may have considered Moore’s law to keep the power budget on point as we slowly scaled our technology upwards. But at this point we are wringing out a few last drops of efficiency from a few processes' nodes, but eventually we will be hitting physical limits much like they were over 60 years ago before the advent of integrated circuits.??

The fact of the matter is that we simply can’t dedicate such a large percentage of the earth’s power to cloud computing, something is going to have to give. It seems like we are hurtling headlong into a brick wall. Our increasing demand for greater computing is clashing with the scant energy supplies. The energy of the planet is not sufficient to meet these demands and the lack will be felt in some places harder than others.??

The most immediate and expedient solution will be to produce more data on the edge before it is sent into the cloud. But this only lightens the burden in some regards and buys a little bit of time while we can think of a better plan for managing computing in the face of limited supply of power.??

This will obviously send reverberations through the science and technology industry and this will place a greater emphasis on power efficiency. Custom silicon will be reengineered to hold more code and methods will be found to allow code to run faster and minimally.??

We can already see one of the symptoms of the situation. There is considerable coupling of energy consumption to private profit centered around the proof-of-work needed to support a crypto currency like bitcoin. Many companies like Square, have announced the application of solar energy to power their crypto operations. But this has mainly been in an effort to deflect bad publicity. But there is much more than poor publicity to fear.??

Bitcoin is now pleading with the world to place profits over the health of the planet. This is something that will become increasingly more common in the future. Let’s hope it never gets to the point where the fate of the world is never in the hands of those with a vested interest in cloud computing or cryptocurrency.