Datacenters that don't have their own power supplies will fail: Gartner

Availability of energy will determine the prices charged by datacenter operators, who won’t be viable unless they generate some of their own juice.

So says Bob Johnson, a VP analyst at Gartner, which on Tuesday published research titled “Emerging Tech: Top Trends in Data Center Power Provisioning.”

Johnson opens by suggesting the AI boom means “newer and larger data centers are being built at a rate that exceeds the support infrastructure that supports it – notably, the traditional power utilities’ ability to supply sufficient electricity.” While electricity utilities are building new generating capacity, those efforts take years and won’t come online in time to power the current datacenter construction pipeline.

Datacenter operators therefore can’t expect to get all the energy they need from the grid and most will build their own generating capacity. Gartner predicts that by 2028, “only 40 percent of all new data centers will rely ...