PHOENIX — In the coming years, power consumption in Arizona is set to skyrocket, thanks to incoming data centers that use generative AI.
Generative AI is a type of AI system that creates photographic or video content on its own.
According to a study by the Electric Power Research Institute, generative AI uses ten times the power a simple Google search uses.
"We've got all the cloud providers," Mark Bauer, with data center broker JLL said. "The Apples, the Googles, the Microsofts, AWS, they're all here."
For Bauer, who buys and sells data centers for customers, business has been good, and is only getting better.
Arizona is the second most popular state in the country for data centers. They're being built all over the Valley, from the 202 and 40th Street to the far East and West Valleys.
They're massive server farms, many with their own power substations and cooling facilities, just to power and cool the computers inside.
And as the technology has improved, so have the power requirements.
"Used to be 50 acres and maybe 100 megawatts," Bauer said. "Our new requirement is we need 200 plus acres and we'd like to have at least 500 megawatts of power or more."
"I think over the next five years, what you will see is our biggest challenge is power," Bauer said. "We're going to run out of power before we run out of land."
EPRI, the group that authored the study on AI power consumption, said the problem is not a few AI requests here and there.
The problem comes when AI use is widespread and there are millions of AI requests coming in every second. Apple recently announced AI integration into the next model of iPhone.
"The challenge right now for the utilities is meeting the growth demand in a timely manner," David Porter, a researcher with EPRI said.
SRP and APS both say they've planned for future power needs coming from AI. APS told 12News it's a question they get a lot, and that they've projected power use for the next 15 years.
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