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Utilization rates

Litterature review

Environmental footprints of the data center service sector in Sweden, Jerleus et al. 2024

Utilization Rate is set to 0.765 as a default.

Source: Environmental footprints of the data center service sector in Sweden, Jerleus et al. 2024

Datacenter Anatomy Part 1 - Electrical, Semi Analysis, 2024

Whereas Critical IT Power refers to the maximum power of the IT equipment, the actual draw from the power grid will include non-IT load such as cooling and lighting, as well as a Utilization rate factor. On average, Power Utilization rate is typically 50-60% for Cloud Computing workloads, and north of 80% for AI training. Enterprises are often even lower than 50%.

  • Cloud Computing: 50-60 %
  • AI training: > 80 %
  • Entreprises: < 50 %

Source: Datacenter Anatomy Part 1 - Electrical, Semi Analysis, 2024

Berkeley Lab 2024 - United States Data Center Energy Usage Report

A 50 average utilization rate has been used for energy consumption estimations.

Source: http://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1372902/

EPRI 2026

  • 20% in the first year of operation
    • 20% per year until full deployment

Specifically, we assume that when a facility comes online, only 20% of its full nominal capacity is active in the first year, ramping up by 20% each year until the facility is fully deployed.

  • 75 % for hyperscalers (> 75 MW)
  • 57 % for co-location
  • peak power demand at 94 % for hyperscale, 88 % for co-location

For this study, EPRI collected facility-level data on load shapes from several anonymous facilities, which showed a peak utilization relative to “nameplate” (as defined by the facility) in the range of 62% to 80% (EPRI, 2025c). The collected profile for a large hyperscale facility (greater than 75 MW nominal capacity with a single tenant) exhibits higher utilization than respondents for smaller co-location facilities with multiple tenants (Figure 3). The average annual load factor relative to nameplate capacity was 75% for the hyperscale facility, while the average across the smaller co-location facilities was 57%. When measured against each facility’s own realized peak demand (rather than nameplate), the load factor was higher, 94% for the hyperscale and 88% on average for co-location facilities.

Source: https://powering-intelligence.epri.com/annual-peak-use.html