IBM Patent Could Rein In Power-Hungry Data Centers

AI is turning up the heat on data centers. 

With tech giants spending billions on developing AI infrastructure, the development of this tech is projected to take a tremendous amount of power. IBM might be looking at ways to handle the digital workload more efficiently.

The company is seeking to patent a system for “energy-efficient deployment of workloads in cloud computing systems.” As the title implies, IBM’s tech aims to deploy tasks in cloud environments while using the minimum possible amount of energy.

“Current workload-scheduling algorithms that are used to deploy and migrate workloads in the cloud computing systems do not account for the energy efficiency of the placement of workloads within the cloud computing systems,” IBM said in the filing. 

IBM’s tech monitors the capacity and power consumption of each server, and identifies which workloads fit best with which server, depending on how much power each task requires. The system will pick a handful of servers that could complete a given task, then simulate how much total energy would be consumed by running it on each server. 

Along with considering how much energy is taken up by the task itself, the system will consider how much power is used booting up a server and how much power is used while it’s sitting idle. IBM’s tech then deploys the workload to the most optimal server. 

The company’s filing adds to several inventions from tech firms that seek to regulate how much energy data centers consume. Nvidia, Microsoft, Intel and Google have all sought to patent similar energy management techniques. And as AI infrastructure investment from tech giants is projected to reach into the trillions, inventions like this could help temper these facilities’ hunger for power.

With cloud computing demand and data center development going nowhere but up, these tools are growing more necessary: Research from the International Energy Agency published in April projects that electricity demand from data centers globally could more than double by 2030, reaching around 945 terawatt-hours, more than the entire country of Japan.