DeepMind AI slashes cooling costs at Google's data centers

Deep learning AI has been put to work in intelligent drones, sequencing genomes, learning the tactics of the ancient Chinese board game Go, and even keeping cats off the lawn. Now, Google has set its DeepMind system loose on its massive data centers, and drastically cut the cost of cooling these facilities in the process. Running Gmail, YouTube, and the all-knowing Google Search guzzles a tremendous amount of power, and while Google has invested heavily in making its servers, cooling systems and energy sources as efficient and green as possible, there's always room for improvement. Especially when the industrial-scale cooling systems are difficult to run efficiently, given the complex interactions that occur between equipment, environment and staff in a data center. To account for all those factors that a human operator or traditional formula-based engineering might miss, the team put DeepMind to work on the problem, and the result was a drastic reduction in power consumption for the center's cooling systems.