The next chip battleground: Data centers

The next time you upload a photo to Facebook, consider this: All those pictures have to be processed and stored somewhere, presumably forever. Some 3 million data centers occupy more than 600 million square feet of space in the U.S. alone to help do so. Trouble is, a single location can slurp as much power as a medium-size town, or about 10.5 million watts, according to Jonathan Koomey, a researcher at Stanford University. Data centers already account for 2.2% of America's total electricity consumption. That is making for hefty utility bills at firms that rely on them — especially data-heavy web services such as Amazon (AMZN) and Google (GOOG).

The culprit for this surge? Smartphones. High-end devices like the iPhone have already outnumbered traditional cellphones in the U.S. this year, according to Nielsen. Users have flocked to data-intensive activities like sharing high-resolution photos and video, surfing the web, and downloading apps. Hence the boom in power-hungry data centers.

In an unexpected twist, smartphones may be the answer to the problems their very popularity helped create. Chips once found exclusively in cellphones are making their way into the building blocks of traditional data centers, like servers. It turns out that such chips may be particularly well-suited for today's high-frequency, in-the-cloud computations — the billions of Internet searches processed each day, for example. They also consume less energy than traditional server chips — one-tenth as much, in fact.

Read the full article on fortune.cnn.com.