The partnership operating the IPM power plant led by the Keystone Fund recently deposited with the local planning and building committee a major plan to build a new data center in Be'er Tuvia. The move, which still requires approval from the planning authorities, seems routine, but the exception is the location where the new center will be built - inside the IPM power plant located in the industrial zone.
According to the plan, the campus will be divided into two data centers - with a total capacity of 40 megawatts of IT, with each spread over an area of 15,000 square meters, above and below ground. How significant is the electricity consumption required in such a center? For comparison, on a typical winter day, the electricity consumption of the entire country at 4pm is 9,000 megawatts.
The estimated cost of building each of the centers is NIS 700 million, so the total investment will be about NIS 1.4 billion.
The new data center will have two main advantages: the fact that it is being built in the power plant yard facilitates statutory procedures, with approvals expected within about five months, after which the development and construction phase will begin, with completion set for 2027. At the same time, the proximity to the IPM power plant in the Be'er Tuvia area, which has a capacity of 451 megawatts, ensures a constant energy supply from a source at zero distance.
This is one of the significant projects of the Keystone Fund, which aims to capture a significant share of the total of 600-700 megawatt IT projects expected to be built in Israel by 2030. At the Israeli market level, the routine capacity of data centers currently stands at 10-20 megawatts of IT, while the world is already seeing huge 100 megawatt IT facilities.
According to estimates, demand will increase over the years, with a focus on AI technology, which requires enormous amounts of energy. According to the World Economic Forum, ChatGPT, for example, consumes 10 times more energy than using Google’s search engine. With generative AI, energy consumption jumps 33 times over using existing applications. Thus although the tech sector is estimated to account for 2%-3% of total global emissions, it is expected to increase dramatically.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on January 15, 2025.
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