Industrial Securities: Rapid Growth in Computing Power Demand Reshapes Data Center Energy Systems

On March 20, Industrial Securities’ research report stated that the demand for computing power is rapidly increasing, leading to a restructuring of the energy system in data centers. The demand for artificial intelligence training and inference is growing quickly, driving the accelerated construction of computing power infrastructure, and the electricity demand of data centers continues to rise. Industry estimates indicate that the electricity consumption of data centers in China is expected to grow from 82.4 billion kilowatt-hours in 2019 to about 370 billion kilowatt-hours by 2028, with its proportion of the total electricity consumption of society continuously increasing. Computing power imposes three core requirements on electricity supply: stability, greenness, and low cost. However, the traditional power system has certain contradictions in terms of accommodating renewable energy and power regulation, and the energy supply model for data centers is undergoing profound changes. As computing power infrastructure continues to expand, data centers are gradually transforming from a single electricity load into an important adjustable resource on the demand side of electricity.