New Delhi, Oct. 21 -- Modern data centres have quietly become the factories of the digital age, powering everything from AI models to cloud services. But as chips get smaller and faster, they also generate more heat. Managing that heat-and the electricity needed to cool it-has become one of the biggest challenges in technology today.

Industry analysts expect electricity consumption from data centres to surge in coming years as AI workloads multiply. In many regions, local power grids are already strained. Nearly half the energy a data centre consumes never reaches the processors-it's spent on air conditioning, liquid cooling, and ventilation systems.

For investors, the message is clear: the new bottleneck for AI is not computing power, ...