On 22 September 2026, the Austrian news programme ZiB2 featured Ivona Brandic, professor of computer science at TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology). Her topic: the construction of large data centres, their electricity consumption – and whether the Austrian grid is built to cope with them.
Two of her statements are worth discussing in any business. First: in Ireland, data centres now consume a quarter of all electricity. Second, when asked about the effect on electricity prices: "If you look at the market mechanisms, that is certainly to be expected."
Brandic also pointed out that there is no separate category for data centres in the environmental impact assessment – even though these facilities are enormous. Hyperscale data centres are built in modules and expanded later, which is why they usually go up "on a greenfield site", where there is room to grow.
The scale we are talking about
If you want to know what "enormous" means in concrete terms, you do not have to travel far. Google is building a data centre in Kronstorf in the Linz-Land district of Upper Austria. The figures reported by ORF Upper Austria:
- Google expects to use up to 150 megawatts initially.
- The grid connection commitment covers up to 400 megawatts. That corresponds to around 3.5 terawatt hours a year – more than all private households in Upper Austria consume combined.
- A later expansion to as much as 1,000 megawatts is considered technically feasible.
- This requires a new 220 kV ring between Ernsthofen and Kronstorf as well as upgraded substations.
For comparison: Upper Austria has just under 676,000 private households. A single facility at the 400-megawatt stage would exceed their entire consumption.
What this has to do with your business software – and what it doesn't
This is where a distinction that often gets lost in the public debate is worth making: not every piece of software that runs in a data centre is a power guzzler.
The energy hunger of the current AI wave comes from training large language models. On ZiB2, Brandic explained it with the sheer volume of computing operations: data is scraped from the internet and processed in massive runs. The Chinese model DeepSeek optimised existing systems – but the actual training had already happened beforehand. Smaller, specialised AI systems, she said, are considerably more resource-efficient.
A CRM or ERP system works in a fundamentally different way. When you open a contact, write an invoice or log a time entry, that is a database query – not a model computation. The difference between a business software environment and a hyperscale site is not a matter of percentages; it is measured in orders of magnitude.
Still, the development affects you too, for a different reason: electricity is priced on the market. If the price rises, it rises for every data centre – including the small ones, including those that never train a single language model. Sooner or later, that shows up in every cost calculation via hosting and licence fees.
Three questions you should ask your software provider
The takeaway from all this is not panic, but curiosity. Three questions are enough to assess how well a provider is set up:
1. Where is the hardware – not the company, but the servers? An Austrian head office tells you nothing about which country your data is stored in. Ask for the specific location of the data centre. Anyone who cannot answer that in one sentence has probably never found out themselves.
2. Where does the power come from, and what happens if it fails? The interesting details are: the share of green electricity, whether the power supply is redundant, whether there is an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) with batteries and whether there is a backup generator behind it. These three levels decide whether a grid outage reaches you as a brief flicker or as a working day without a system.
3. Where exactly is AI used in the product? This is the real cost question of the coming years. Does every click run through a language model, or is AI used specifically where it takes real work off your hands? A provider who can spell this out has thought about it. One who slaps "AI" as a label on the whole product usually has not.
How 1Tool is set up
Since we ask these questions ourselves, here are our own answers:
Location. 1Tool runs in Wels, in the data centre of eww ITandTEL, the IT division of the Wels-based eww Group. No hyperscaler, no third country – a regional operator in Upper Austria.
Power. According to ITandTEL, its data centres are supplied with 100 percent certified green electricity, redundantly, from the group's own grid. Around three quarters of it comes from the Traunleiten hydroelectric power plant near Wels. The site is protected by two separate UPS systems with batteries, backed by a diesel generator. Cooling is provided by redundant free cooling, using outside air instead of constantly running chillers. The site is certified to ISO/IEC 27001.
AI. We use AI in 1Tool in clearly defined places: specialised agents that read invoices, insurance documents, CVs and commission statements. They run as background jobs – not on every click and not as a constant load. This is not a cost-cutting measure but a quality decision – and, incidentally, it is also the more economical option.
What remains
The political debate about environmental impact assessments will take place, and grid expansion in Upper Austria will happen. Both are beyond what a single business can influence.
What you can influence is something else: knowing where your own data is stored, how that place is powered and how much computing power the software you use actually needs. Brandic closed with a sentence that sums up the situation well: "Nobody wants it, everybody needs it."
All the more reason to take a close look at where you stand.
Frequently asked questions
Does a cloud CRM use a lot of electricity? Compared with AI data centres, no. Conventional business software consists mainly of database queries; its energy requirement is orders of magnitude below that of facilities that train language models. What matters more for you is the general electricity price, because it affects all data centres.
Where is 1Tool data stored? In Austria, in the eww ITandTEL data centre in Wels.
What does UPS mean and why is it important? UPS stands for uninterruptible power supply. Batteries bridge the moment of a grid outage until a backup generator takes over. Without this chain, a power cut at the data centre also brings your system to a halt.
Is green electricity in the data centre a sales pitch or a real difference? It can be either – which is why asking about the source makes sense. A traceable supply, for example from a named hydroelectric plant, is more reliable than a general sustainability promise.