IDCA datacentres report: Global concentration and the Goldilocks zone

International haves and have-nots

The report concluded that 5% of electricity grid usage going to datacentres was the threshold at which public concern, government regulation and grid supply can be seen to increase. It pointed to the US, which has seen community pushback and connection difficulties in the Midwest, Texas and California, with multi-year delays in the ability to provision power new facilities.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland have exceeded the 9% consumption level, while that’s also the case for Singapore. 

Also in Europe, the report found that countries with electricity grids driven by nuclear power – such as France, Slovakia and Slovenia – may relieve these constraints. 

At the other end of the scale, it discovered that more than 70 countries devoted less than 0.1% of their power to datacentres, and for more than 30 countries that figure was less than 0.01%.

Datacentre energy use league table

Singapore used the highest proportion of its electricity to power datacentres at 19.5% of the total generated. Next in the IDCA report was Lithuania (11.1%), the Netherlands (9.7%), Denmark (8.4%), Ireland (8.2%), Estonia (6.9%), Luxembourg (6.3%), Germany (6.1%), Hong Kong (6%) and the US (6%). Further down the rankings are Australia (5.1%), the UK (3.6%), South Korea (2%), Japan (1.2%), and India and China (both 0.8%).

IDCA built what it described as an optimised national model of ideal consumption levels for each nation, noting that construction of new datacentres was contingent on stronger electricity grids and robust fibre-optic networks.

For developed nations, IDCA said 6.25% of national electricity consumption was an effective cap on datacentre growth – i.e., it was the point at which the correlation was very strong between datacentre consumption and political actions and community pushback that result in projects being cancelled or slowed.  

Meanwhile, IDCA ranked countries by the headroom they possess to build datacentres without significantly needing to develop new electricity generation. Here, IDCA ranked countries by headroom measured in GW. China led the way with 58.9GW of headroom, followed by India (12.7GW), Russia (6.7GW), Japan (5.5GW), Brazil (4.5GW), Canada (3.6GW), South Korea (3.2GW), Saudi Arabia (2.6GW), Iran (2.4GW) and Mexico (2.4GW).

The water stress scale

IDCA pointed out that modern AI datacentres require liquid cooling but that a lot of pushback around perceived worries over water use are misguided. That’s because the latest direct-to-chip cooling systems are closed systems that recycle water somewhat similar to a car radiator.

Having said that, the IDCA report stated: “The vast majority of existing traditional cloud and enterprise facilities rely on older, less efficient cooling architectures like water-cooled chillers or evaporative cooling towers. In these legacy designs, water is evaporated to remove the latent heat of vaporisation from the air, and that evaporated water is never recovered.”

The IDCA report ranked countries on a “water stress” scale of 0-100, where those with deserts are unsurprisingly high on the scale and mountainous and riverine states at the low end. Most at risk are Bahrain (100), Belize (86), Libya (80), Kuwait (80) and South Sudan (73). The least at risk are Norway (0), New Zealand (0), Iceland (1), Canada (2) and Bhutan (3).

Servers per head differential of 100,000x

The IDCA report said there was a difference of 100,000x in the number of servers per head of population between the most and least dense in this respect.  Providing connectivity alongside this, IDCA said there was an estimated 1.3 to 1.5 million km of subsea cables, in around 550 systems, with about 1,200 landing stations. 

Out of these, there are around 70 landing stations in the US, 50 in the UK and more than 12 in countries that include the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, Denmark, Sweden and some Middle Eastern countries. Meanwhile, there are around 14 million km of terrestrial cables in main networks. 

IT jobs deficit

IDCA found that IT jobs worldwide account for between 0.1% and 4% of populations. According to IDCA, 2.5% of the workforce employed in tech was optimum to “to ensure a thorough, successful digital economy creation and management”, though this varied based on local conditions and expectations. 

Overall, the IDCA found that there was a deficit of 100 million IT-related jobs worldwide, with developing nations accounting for 80% of that.

Ranking countries with the most deficit, top of the list was India, with a shortfall of 28.8 million in the IT workforce, followed by China (17.5 million), Pakistan (5.8 million), Nigeria (5.8 million), and Indonesia (5.3 million). 

Gamma, Sigma and Goldilocks

The report covered a number of other areas in connection with datacentres that include datacentre security, standards, design, investment and community pushback. It also provided three indexes: Gamma, Sigma and Goldilocks, with countries ranked 0-100. 

The Gamma index looked at technological and social factors in digital readiness. Top of the list was: Finland at 85 (with Scandinavia collectively ranking 83), the Netherlands (83), Estonia (80), New Zealand (79) and Switzerland (79). Bottom of the list was: Equatorial Guinea (4), South Sudan (12), Turkmenistan (17), Haiti (17), and Democratic Republic of Congo (19). The UK ranked 14th, with a score of 74. 

The Sigma index integrated the Gamma index, with adjustments for stress on water and electricity grids, such as the amount of headroom they possess, for example. The Sigma index was topped by Finland (99), followed by Sweden (97), Norway (97), New Zealand (94) and Iceland (94). The UK was ranked 15th (84).

“The Sigma Index is useful in determining a nation’s overall suitability for rapid datacentre growth and the digital infrastructure that would accompany it,” the report said.

Finally, the IDCA report provided a Goldilocks index, which technological factors are separated from the rest then comparing those to the cost of living and income. That way, it hoped to provide an idea of countries for whom rapid development would not be disruptive and would hit “just right”. Top of the Goldilocks index was Colombia with a score of 5.2, followed by North Macedonia, China, South Africa and Montenegro, all on 5.2 except the last of these (5.1).