This guide provides an overview of best practices for energy-efficient data center design which spans the categories of information technology (IT) systems and their environmental conditions, data center air management, cooling and electrical systems, and heat recovery. Data centres are responsible for about 1. 5%, or 415 Terawatt-Hours (TWh), of the world's total yearly electricity consumption. Projections indicate that their consumption is set to more than double towards 945 TWh by 2030, primarily due to the substantial growth of energy-intensive accelerated. In the Annual Energy Outlook 2026 (AEO2026), our long-term outlook, we project electricity consumed by data center servers will increase across the commercial building stock, increasing more in standalone data centers than in all other data center rooms combined. This surge is driven primarily by the explosive growth in artificial intelligence workloads, which require significantly more computational power.
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