Nations around the world are rapidly building out the infrastructure needed to take part in the AI boom–including massive, multibillion dollar investments in data centers, which house and manage the servers needed to process, store and share information.
Yet data centers guzzle up energy and water, needed to power servers and cool systems. And that may end up putting strain on another industry that’s just as important for a country’s future: Agriculture.
“The electricity that we’re using for our data centers and AI chips? Don’t forget that it is also required for us to grow food,” said Gerard Lim, CEO of Agroz, a vertical farming startup, at the Fortune Innovation Forum in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Tuesday.
Singapore, for example, briefly paused data center investments in 2019 due to concerns about electricity use and water consumption. And in the U.S., electricity prices are rising in states with greater data center construction, like Virginia.
“Don’t forget the humans in the equation—because the energy all these data centers are utilizing is going to leave the human sectors out at some point,” Lim warned.
Food security
On top of resource competition, burgeoning populations and rising wealth also means higher demand for good quality food.
“What’s driving the rapid demand for food is our changing eating habits. As we become richer, we want more protein,” said Richard Skinner, a partner in private capital from Olivia Wyman.
Lensey Chen, Asia-Pacific president at Novonesis, a biosolutions company, echoed these concerns. “By 2050, there will be an additional 50% [increase] of demand to feed the world’s population, and it’s critically important to increase the yield, increase output from existing resources,” she said.
New technologies could help to fill the gap. Lim claimed that Agroz had been able to use technology and controlled environments to increase yields by as much as 500% while using 20 times less water compared to traditional open-field farming. “Technology and innovation are very important for us to grow in less land and use less resources,” Lim said.
Yet Skinner said that state-of-the-art innovation might not be the only, or easiest, way to boost agriculture productivity.
“We want to have to have technologies we can deploy today,” Skinner argued, citing greenhouses, irrigation techniques, fermentation, and better data monitoring for livestock as well-understood technologies that have yet to be widely adopted in Asia.
Rice farming, for example, contributes 8% of the world’s carbon emissions, due to how farmers flood rice fields, Skinner added. The water in these rice fields creates a low-oxygen environment which kills most weeds and keeps pests away. But the anaerobic conditions cause microorganisms to produce and release methane, a greenhouse gas.
Instead, Skinner suggested that farmers can use drip irrigation, an efficient method of applying water slowly and directly to the soil around the roots of plants. This would reduce water consumption and cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Tastier food
While it’s easy to focus on producing more food, or more sustainable food, when talking about the agricultural sector, panelists noted that it was just as important to discuss making food healthier, more nutritious, or just tastier.
“We go food shopping not just because it’s sustainable. It’s because it’s tasty, it’s nutritious, it’s healthy, right?” Chen said. She continued that the company was now working with the food industry–including Noma, a three-Michelin-star Copenhagen-based restaurant, to develop new ways to develop food. “They are masters of taste, and we are masters of fermentation,” she said.
