How to Lower the Energy Needs of AI Data Centers Through Efficient Storage and Archiving

EPRI predicts a severe energy shortfall in the years ahead as AI becomes mainstream. The blue line represent data center energy consumption; the red line represents the ability of the energy system to provide electricity.

Enhanced patient care and diagnostics in healthcare, personalized learning experiences in education, improved safety and efficiency in transportation, smart living environments via home automation, better connectivity and understanding in the world at large – the potential for AI may be limitless – but the amount of energy available to realize the AI revolution is not. Utilities are complaining that they don’t have enough power to satisfy the requests coming in from new data centers.

The gap between available energy and data center demand is widening each year. Goldman Sachs predicts that data center power demand will grow by as much as 165% by 2030. The Electric Power Research Association (EPRI) forecasts that U.S. data center power demand will likely increase from around a 2.9% share of the national total today to as high as 9% by 2030.

“How will we obtain all the electricity needed for AI?” asked Ted Oade, Product Marketing Director, Spectra Logic, at the recent Active Archive Alliance virtual conference, Why AI Needs Active Archive. “Lack of energy availability threatens the progress of AI.”

Analyst firm Omdia found that energy consumption by AI applications has risen from 10% of data center power capacity in 2020 to around 30% today. Omdia predicts that it could reach 45% by 2030. Bloomberg Intelligence goes so far as to forecast a tenfold increase in data center electricity consumption by 2030. The construction of a massive number of new data centers is driving this surge. Omdia reports that data center spending reached $466 billion in 2024 worldwide. Much of this investment is into high rack-density facilities customized to operate AI applications.

Innovation could change the game from areas like liquid cooling and developments trickling down from the Department of Energy’s COOLERCHIPS program. However, the most immediate solution is to cut energy consumption in any way possible.

“Storage offers a major pathway to reduced data center costs,” said Oade. “With the proliferation of power-hungry AI infrastructure, data centers have limited options for power savings…. Tape can help.”

He added that tape delivers a number of benefits compared to alternatives. This includes the lowest power consumption of any storage medium, the lowest TCO, streaming performance that is superior to HDDs (when writing continuously to tape), scalability beyond 1 exabyte in a single system, true offline air-gap security, up to 30 years of archival life (3X that of HDD), and flexible consumption models (CAPEX on-prem or OPEX cloud service).

As seen in the chart above, tape is far ahead of SSD, HDD, and the cloud on watts per TB and TCO. It isn’t even close.

Shawn O. Brume, Tape Evangelist and Strategist at IBM, dug further into the numbers to evaluate the real cost of data. Data centers currently consume 2.9% of planetary energy, and much of that data is stored on HDDs. Tape uses 93% less energy than HDD; 70% of stored data is cold or very infrequently accessed. This equates to 51 TW per year globally in energy reduction potential and $6.5 billion in annual energy savings by moving all but warm or hot data to tape. That money could then be invested in AI and other areas of innovation.

“There is no other viable, stable choice for long-term storage than tape,” said Brume.

Yet projections for the use of HDD and SSD are that both could double by 2030. Due to the lack of energy availability, something will have to give. Tape may be the answer for many.

The arguments favoring tape do not boil down purely to cost and energy consumption. Sustainability, too, must be factored in. A positive approach to tape media disposal has emerged that brings about a 50% or more reduction in CO₂ emissions. Certified secure media degaussing can now be done in minutes, added Brume, with no need to burn and incinerate the material.

“All of the bugs and practicalities of access, scale, manufacturing, and supply chain have been worked out for the tape industry,” said Jim Bain, Ph.D. at Carnegie-Mellon.