Data centers use as little as 60% of power consumed for actual AI work, Nvidia claims — failures and restarts 'consume' a whopping 10% of every watt used
- Nvidia claims that for each gigawatt an AI data center uses, only 70% is used for AI work
- Inefficiencies include cooling and power distribution, failures, and restarts
- While a chip shortage was considered to be the main bottleneck to AI data center capacity, it is now a facility’s connection to the grid
AI data centers are inefficient, says Nvidia, with various physical and systems issues contributing to power use beyond AI processing. This opinion, shared by data center builder Vertiv at its recent annual EMEA event, underpins future development steps, in which it plans to assemble sustainable facilities.
Vertiv and Nvidia have been collaborating since early 2026 on co-designing the next generation of data centers, with Vertiv providing power and infrastructure management for Nvidia’s GPUs.
With a maximum of 70% of electricity drawn from the grid used for AI processing, the remaining 30% represents inefficiencies that optimized data center...
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