Tag Archives: geothermal energy and data centers

The Quick and Dirty AI Boom

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Nowhere else on Earth has been physically reshaped by artificial intelligence as quickly as the Malaysian state of Johor. Three years ago, this region next to Singapore was a tech-industry backwater. Palm-oil plantations dotted the wetlands. Now rising next to those tropical trees 100 miles from the equator are cavernous rectangular buildings that, all together, make up one of the world’s biggest AI construction projects…

TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, is spending $350 million on data centers in Johor. Microsoft just bought a 123-acre plot not far away for $95 million. Asset manager Blackstone recently paid $16 billion to buy AirTrunk, a data-center operator with Asia-wide locations including a Johor facility spanning an area the size of 19 football fields. Oracle last week announced a $6.5 billion investment in Malaysia’s data-center sector, though it didn’t specify where. In all, investments in data centers in Johor, which can be used for both AI and more conventional cloud computing, will reach $3.8 billion this year, estimates regional bank Maybank.

To understand how one of the first boomtowns of the AI era sprouted at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, consider the infrastructure behind AI. Tech giants want to train chatbots, driverless cars and other AI technology as quickly as possible. They do so in data centers with thousands of computer chips, which require a lot of power, as well as water for cooling…Northern Virginia became the world’s biggest data-center market because of available power, water and land. But supply is running low. Tech companies can’t build data centers fast enough in the U.S. alone. Enter Johor. It has plentiful land and power—largely from coal—and enough water. Malaysia enjoys generally friendly relations with the U.S. and China, reducing political risk for companies from the rival nations. The other important factor: location. Across the border is Singapore, which has one of the world’s densest intersections of undersea internet cables. Those are modern-age highways, enabling tech companies to sling mountains of data around the world.

Excerpt from Stu Woo, One of the Biggest AI Boomtowns Is Rising in a Tech-Industry Backwater, WSJ, Oct.  8, 2024

Oil Companies Never Die: the advantage of geothermal energy

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Oil-and-gas companies are accelerating investments in geothermal energy, betting the technologies that fueled the shale revolution can turn the budding industry into a large producer of clean power… Many of these companies are using the same technology employed by frackers, but instead of searching for oil and gas, they are looking for underground heat. The new geothermal industry is the result of a surprising confluence of interests among the oil-and-gas, technology and green power industries. The heat that the drillers find underground can be used to generate a steady, round-the-clock supply of carbon-free electricity, which is coveted by tech companies for their power-hungry data centers. 

Finding pockets of underground heat is relatively easy in places with lots of geothermal activity, including parts of the U.S., Indonesia and New Zealand. When the heat is deeper in the earth, it is more difficult and more expensive to find. Those constraints have kept the sector’s share of U.S. electricity generation at less than 1%. …Oil companies understand subsurface geology, have experience building infrastructure projects and have cash available to deploy. That is why Chevron is joining with other companies and pursuing geothermal pilot projects in Japan, Indonesia and the U.S.

Excerpts from Amrith Ramkumar, Frackers Are Now Drilling for Clean Power, WSJ, Feb. 29, 2024