DeepMind AI helps Google slash datacenter energy bills

Google's 500m purchase of DeepMind is paying off in more ways than one, helping the search firm slash the energy it uses cooling its datacenters by 40 percent. The DeepMind-powered savings on cooling have resulted in an overall 15 percent reduction in its datacenters' PUE (power usage effectiveness), a measure of how much energy is used by IT as a proportion of the total energy used by a building. How Google DeepMind's ant soccer skills can help improve your search results Google's artificial-intelligence researchers at DeepMind have developed a new algorithm that improves its game-play capabilities. With the shift to cloud computing, the tech sector has emerged as one of the world's biggest users of energy, much of it from dirty sources such as coal. To help cut its carbon footprint from the 4,402,836MWh Google's datacenters used in 2014, the company has, for example, built a datacenter in Finland where seawater is used for cooling equipment, and pays Swedish wind farms to compensate its other energy consumption. DeepMind offers yet another answer to this challenge by allowing Google to optimize its datacenters' efficiency with a series of deep neural networks that predict future energy requirements and provide recommended actions to achieve an optimal PUE.