Google reveals AI system taking charge of its data centres

In 2016 Google and DeepMind collaborated to develop an AI-powered recommendation system with the goal to improve the energy efficiency of Google's data centres. And now, Google has taken this same AI system and enhanced it to remove human-implemented recommendations and instead let it directly control data centre cooling itself – while under expert supervision of course. So how does it work? "Every five minutes, our cloud-based AI pulls a snapshot of the data centre cooling system from thousands of sensors and feeds it into our deep neural networks, which predict how different combinations of potential actions will affect future energy consumption," Google's Amanda Gasparik and DeepMind's Chris Gamble and Jim Gao reported in a release. "The AI system then identifies which actions will minimise the energy consumption while satisfying a robust set of safety constraints. Those actions are sent back to the data centre, where the actions are verified by the local control system and then implemented."