AI Vocabulary · 02 AI Infrastructure
What is Data Centre?
A building full of servers, storage and network equipment, with the power and cooling that AI runs on.
Every AI answer is computed somewhere physical: in a data centre. It houses thousands of servers with AI chips, storage and networks, plus the electricity supply and cooling to keep them running day and night.
AI is making data centres much larger and hungrier for power. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), data centres used about 485 terawatt hours of electricity in 2025, around 1.5 percent of the world's consumption. The IEA expects this to roughly double, to about 950 terawatt hours by 2030. A typical AI-focused data centre uses as much electricity as 100,000 households; the largest ones under construction will use about 20 times as much.
Epoch AI expected several sites to pass one gigawatt of power in 2026 and estimated the cost of such facilities at around 44 billion US dollars per gigawatt.
Why it matters for you
Where a data centre stands decides which laws apply to your data, how much energy and water your AI use draws on, and how close the computing is to your users.
Own it
Ask your providers in which country and region your data is processed and stored. For sensitive data, choose EU locations or self-hosting, and keep it documented. That is part of data sovereignty.
Where it comes from
The energy figures come from the IEA reports Key Questions on Energy and AI (April 2026) and Energy and AI (2025). The gigawatt and cost estimates come from Epoch AI's Frontier Data Centers Hub (November 2025). All forward-looking numbers are projections.
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