While the term “hyperscale” is used to describe the large data campuses that power artificial intelligence applications — and concern environmentalists to a great degree — Derek Schnabel, a facility engineer for Epic, uses the term “district scale” to describe the geothermal system that helps cool buildings on the electronic medical records company’s expanding Verona campus.
Could such a green energy alternative help cool the energy-intensive, hyperscale data centers that are popping up throughout southern Wisconsin — and save energy in the process? Given the energy requirements of these large data centers, environmentalists would like data center operators to explore this and other sustainable possibilities.
These centers, which house thousands of servers in multiple buildings, are designed to meet the massive computational and storage demands of major cloud and AI providers. They require more powerful chips and intense cooling systems due to the heat they generate, so their energy demands are much greater than a conventional data center.