How Big is the Datacenter Power Consumption?

How Big is the Datacenter Power Consumption? The proliferation of cloud computing services has promoted massive-scale, geographically distributed datacenters with millions of servers. Large cloud service providers consume many megawatts of power to operate such datacenters and the corresponding annual electricity bills are in the order of tens of millions of dollars — such as Google with over 1,120 GWh and $67 M, and Microsoft with over 600 GWh and $36 M [1]. Reportedly, datacenters now consume about 1.3 percent of the worldwide electricity and this fraction will grow to 8 percent by 2020 [2]. As a matter of fact, the aggregate datacenters in the world consumes more electricity than most nations in the world except 4 countries [3].