The proliferation of data centers aimed at meeting the computing needs of AI could be bad news for the US power grid, according to a new report in Bloomberg.
Using 1 million residential sensors tracked by Whisker Labs, along with market intelligence data from DC Byte, Bloomberg found that more than half of the households experiencing the worst power distortions live within 20 miles of significant activity of the data center.
In other words, there appears to be a link between data center proximity and “bad harmonics”—a term for the less-than-ideal flow of electricity in the home.
Bloomberg says this “distorted” power can eventually destroy plugged-in equipment, increase vulnerability to electrical fires and even lead to outages and outages. And AI data centers can be even more problematic because of their volatile power requirements.
“No network is designed to be able to handle that kind of load fluctuation not just for one data center, but for multiple data centers at the same time,” said Bloom Energy chief commercial officer Aman Joshi.
A spokesperson for Chicago’s Commonwealth Edison told Bloomberg that the utility “only questions the accuracy and underlying assumptions of Whisker Labs’ claims.”
