ESG Research Paper
“One of the main features of GPUs, along with their fast calculation speed, is their rapid rate of energy consumption.”
Above all, this growth is attributable to the intense race of hyperscalers, such as Microsoft and Meta, and their investments toward vital components of AI infrastructure, such as GPUs. Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) are best seen as accelerators for Central Processing Units (CPUs) within AI, due to their ability to simultaneously compute billions of certain operations per second. Accordingly, this has caused the data center GPU market size to grow tremendously, with the market currently being valued at $14.3 billion and estimated to grow at a CAGR of about 35% by 2028.
Unfortunately, this high growth comes at a cost. One of the main features of GPUs, along with their fast calculation speed, is their rapid rate of energy consumption. For example, NVIDIA's latest GPU, the H100, consumes up to 700W of power at its peak - more than an average American household.
Many energy reports believe that annual data center energy consumption will double by 2026, going from 460 terawatts to over 1000 - about the same as a year's energy consumption in all of Japan.
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What's Inside
Key takeaways from the white paper.
Data center GPU market: $14.3B currently, projected ~35% CAGR through 2028.
NVIDIA H100 GPU consumes up to 700W at peak — more than an average US household.
Annual data center energy consumption projected to double by 2026 (460 TWh → 1000+ TWh).
By 2030, US data centers are projected to consume ~10% of national electricity (vs ~2.6% YoY growth historically).
Power grid market growing at meager 6% CAGR vs data centers at 19% by 2027 — supply gap is forming.
A single ChatGPT query consumes 6-10x the power of a traditional Google search.
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ESG Research Paper
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