Server stock data - A basis for determining the energy and resource requirements of data centres

More and larger data centres are being built around the world. The rated electrical power of a single large data centre campus is often in the three-digit megawatt range nowadays. Such a data centre has the power consumption of a large city. But what is the total power consumption of all data centres worldwide? How high is the demand for other resources such as water and materials? And what future developments can be expected? A powerful and promising approach to answering these questions is the use of bottom-up models, which determine the energy and resource requirements based on the inventory figures of the devices and systems present in the data centres. Unfortunately, there is little available and reliable data on such inventory figures. This paper aims to make a contribution to reducing this lack of information. To this end, it focuses on the server equipment category, which clearly accounts for the highest proportion of the energy and resource requirements of data centres. Based on available information in scientific publications and data from market analysts, we estimate the total number of existing servers. We come to the conclusion that around 80 million servers will probably be in operation worldwide in 2024.