When Google acquired DeepMind, an artificial intelligence subsidiary co-founded by Demis Hassabis, it got another benefit: big savings in its power costs.
Hassabis, who is of Greek Cypriot and Singaporean descent and lives in London, is a pre-eminent neuro-scientist and artificial intelligence researcher who has won the World Games championship five times.
In a feature by the Bloomberg business agency, it was reported that Google’s Alphabet Inc. unit put a DeepMind AI system in control of parts of its data centers to reduce power consumption by manipulating computer servers and related equipment like cooling systems.
It uses a similar technique to DeepMind software that taught itself to play Atari video games, Hassabis said in an interview at a recent AI conference in New York.
The system cut power usage in the data centers by several percentage points, “which is a huge saving in terms of cost but, also, great for the environment,” he said.
The savings translate into a 15 percent improvement in power usage efficiency, or PUE, Google said in a statement. PUE measures how much electricity Google uses for its computers, versus the supporting infrastructure like cooling systems.
It’s a big financial deal for a company that uses so much power. Saving a few percentage points of electricity could save Google a bundle, hundreds of millions of dollars over the years of usage.
Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 for 400 million pounds, or more than $600 million at the time, according to The Guardian.
The application of DeepMind’s technology builds on previous efforts by Google to apply machine learning, a type of AI, to its data centers.
Back in 2014, the company said it used neural networks, a type of pattern recognition system, to predict how its power usage would change over time, letting it arrange equipment in more efficient ways.
The software changes how equipment runs inside the data centers to get the highest score, in this case more efficient consumption of electricity.
“It controls about 120 variables in the data centers. The fans and the cooling systems and so on, and windows and other things,” Hassabis said. “They were pretty astounded.”