Implementing AI has created more demand for energy-intensive data centers that can train and run the systems, more than doubling the need for new electricity capacity from 460 TWh in 2022 to 1k TWh by 2026, according to a report from the Economist Impact. High compute density stable electricity voltages and constant liquid cooling — both energy-intensive — are necessary for AI-compatible data centers and are usually not integrated in most existing data centers.

The hold-up: Lack of sufficient investments in energy generation, transmission, and distribution has also created a hold-up for using AI. A new data centre can be built in 18 months, but new power transmission lines can take four to eight years to build, executive VP at Schneider Electric Pankaj Sharma told the Economist.

How much power does AI need? A prompt to ChatGPT requires nearly tenfold the amount of energy a Google search needs to run, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA) (pdf). This means that global data centers will need to double their electricity usage by 2030 to accommodate AI models, accounting for a third of global electricity demand by the same year.

The UAE is in the lead in the data center race: The UAE currently hosts over 250 MW of operational data centers capacity and an additional 500 MW are in development, with 150 MW set to go live by end-2025. Abu Dhabi and Dubai have worked on rapid infrastructure rollout, competitive infrastructure costs, fast-track approvals, and accelerating demand tied to AI and cloud expansion. UAE AI giant G42 will build a 5 GW US-UAE data center complex, across 10 square miles in Abu Dhabi, for several unnamed, large UAE enterprises. Khazna partnered up with Nvidia to develop AI factories across the Middle East and Africa, including AI clusters with a capacity of up to 250 MW

Saudi Arabia is also catching up,, with their data center capacity to reach 1.3GW by 2030. PIF-backed Humain and Qualcomm Technologies will collaborate on next-gen AI data centers. The Kingdom is also planning a USD 100 bn AI push to rival the UAE. Saudi tech company DataVolt and Neom signed a USD 5 bn agreement to develop a 1.5 GW data center in the Oxagon industrial complex using renewable energy and zero-emission cooling technologies.

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