Power Outages Threaten Houston Data Center in Intense Heat

(Bloomberg) — Lumen Technologies Inc. said post-hurricane power outages are prompting partial service disruptions for its Houston-area clients.

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The internet-service provider’s Houston data center is relying on backup generators amid “widespread commercial power failures due to Tropical Storm Beryl,” spokesman Mark Molzen said in an email. “The commercial power failure is impacting multiple companies in the area, including Lumen. We are maintaining partial service using generators and is working with the power company to resolve their issue.”

Lumen operates a 51,300-square-foot data center in Houston’s Greenspoint neighborhood.

The data center is among more than 2 million homes and businesses that lost power after Beryl struck Texas as a Category 1 hurricane on Monday. This wouldn’t be the first time power failures and extreme weather disrupted data center operations.

In 2022, London data centers used by Google and Oracle Corp. were knocked offline amid a record-setting heat wave that affected cooling systems. Six years ago, high humidity during a swampy heat wave baking the New York City area disrupted data-center operations in New Jersey where US stocks were traded, slowing transactions. In 2007, a series of electrical glitches in San Francisco cut off service to data centers, disabling websites including Craigslist and Yelp.

But the stakes are higher today. A worldwide boom in artificial intelligence has made businesses more dependent on data centers than ever. And the expanding electricity and cooling demands of such facilities have grown increasingly contentious, with the surge in power use from data centers now outstripping available power supplies in many parts of the world.

CenterPoint Energy Inc., which provides power to Lumen’s Houston complex, said it hasn’t heard specifically from any data centers asking to be re-energized and was working to find sites to add mobile generators, spokesperson Logan Anderson said.

–With assistance from Tope Alake and Lynn Doan.

(Updates with CenterPoint comment in seventh paragraph.)