The big energy trilemma needs to be solved to ramp up AI, says NEXTDC CEO | The Business | ABC NEWS

The increasing take up of artificial intelligence is driving the demand to build more data centres, with ever increasing demand for energy.
The Australian data centre operator NEXTDC says its forward order book is bigger than the company is today, and chief executive, Craig Scroggie, says finding a way to power the huge energy needs of data centres with renewable energy is key to ramping up AI.
But he says there's an energy "trilemma" that needs to be solved first.

"Green energy, cheap energy, and firm energy is not a simple thing to solve", he said.

He told ABC's The Business, Australia needs to not only have renewable energy, but also firm base load energy to be a world leader in AI and data centres.

"At the same time, we have to retire coal fired power stations and gas and make that transition, deploy large scale batteries, and really consider other future base load energy technologies that are net zero," he said.

A huge amount of drinking water is often used to cool data centres. Mr Scroggie says NEXTDC is looking into sewer mining to use treated waste water instead of drinking water to cool data centres.
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