Amazon says its four new data centers in Oregon have not received enough electricity from the local utility, a possible sign of increased strain on the grid due to rapid technological advancements.
Amazon says its four new data centers in Oregon have not received enough electricity from the local utility, a possible sign of increased strain on the grid due to rapid technological advancements.
Portland utility PacifiCorp has breached a 2021 commitment to provide enough electricity for four Amazon data centers used for cloud computing, mobile apps and streaming services, Bloomberg reports .
The tech giant said it had been given insufficient capacity for one data center, none at all for a second, and that it had “refused to even complete its own standard contracting process” for the third and fourth campuses.
So last week, Amazon filed a complaint with the Oregon Public Utilities Regulatory Commission.
This conflict has arisen at a time when President Donald Trump is using the full weight of the US government to accelerate the development of data centers for artificial intelligence, as well as the supply of energy needed to power them.
According to a BloombergNEF analysis, electricity demand from AI computing systems is expected to more than double in the US by 2035.
