Amman — A report by the World Economic Forum has identified geothermal resources in Jordan, near the eastern part of the Dead Sea, as among the region’s promising sites for low-carbon electricity generation, amid growing demand for power to operate artificial intelligence data centers.
According to the World Economic Forum’s recently published report, “Powering AI at Scale,” Jordan has locations with high-quality geothermal resources, alongside Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa. This opens the door to exploring the potential of these resources to provide stable power supplies for electricity-intensive facilities.
Geothermal energy is a source of power based on extracting heat from deep within the Earth and using it to generate low-carbon electricity continuously around the clock.
The World Economic Forum report explains that enhanced geothermal systems use advanced drilling and reservoir stimulation technologies. Wells are drilled to depths exceeding 2.5 kilometers and extended horizontally for approximately 1.5 kilometers. Fluids are then circulated through engineered fractures in the rock to capture heat and transport it to the surface, where it is used to power turbines and generate electricity.
Geothermal energy can also be used directly to cool data centers through absorption chillers.
The report noted that enhanced geothermal systems rely on advanced drilling technologies to reach hot rocks deep underground and extract their heat, enabling continuous electricity generation without the fluctuations associated with the availability of some renewable energy sources.
The technology is gaining increasing importance as artificial intelligence expands, driving growth in the number of data centers and increasing their electricity requirements to operate servers, process data and cool equipment around the clock.
The report said reliable electricity supplies represent one of the main challenges facing the expansion of digital infrastructure in the region, which is simultaneously experiencing rising temperatures and growing pressure on water resources, along with increasing electricity demand for cooling.
According to the report, geothermal energy can provide continuous low-carbon electricity while reducing reliance on fuel and its supply chains. It also requires relatively less land compared with some other renewable energy options.
The potential uses of these resources are not limited to electricity generation. The report also highlights the possibility of using geothermal heat directly for absorption cooling applications, allowing energy production and facility cooling to be combined. This could be particularly valuable in hot environments where data centers face high cooling demands.
