(Yicai) July 22 -- Electricity consumption by data centers in China’s Guangdong province soared 21.1 percent in the first half from a year earlier as rapid growth in large artificial intelligence models, big data and the industrial internet fueled demand for computing power.

The southern province’s 309 data centers consumed 5.97 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in the first six months, Guangdong Power Grid, a unit of China Southern Power Grid which is one of the country’s two main power utility firms, told Yicai yesterday.

Shaoguan recorded the fastest growth in data center electricity use, with consumption more than quintupling in the six months ended June 30 from a year earlier as new facilities started operations and existing capacity expanded. The city is home to the only national-level data center cluster within the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area national computing hub and supports the overflow of large-scale intelligent computing demand from the region’s two hub cities Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

Reliable power infrastructure is critical to the operating costs and stable performance of computing projects. Guangdong Power Grid is ensuring adequate power supply for the sector by providing comprehensive support spanning planning, grid infrastructure and services, it said.

Every additional 10,000 standard server racks requires about 25,000 megawatts of new power load, Hu Lieliang, deputy general manager of the planning and development department at China Southern Power Grid’s Guangdong Shaoguan Power Supply Bureau, told Yicai.

“We plan substations the same way we plan server racks, advancing the construction of grid infrastructure so that the power grid and computing capacity expand in tandem,” he added.

The medium to long-term increase in electricity demand from computing power is expected to remain significant.

Electricity consumption by China’s computing sector is likely to rise by more than 100 billion kilowatt-hours on average each year between 2026 and 2030, reaching 800 billion kilowatt-hours in 2030, or about 6 percent of the country’s total electricity consumption, Zhang Lin, director of the China Electricity Council’s planning and development department, said at a press conference last week.

China’s computing centers consumed 170 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity last year, accounting for 1.6 percent of the country’s total power consumption, according to data released previously by the National Energy Administration.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Kim Taylor