Artificial intelligence (AI) will require truly unprecedented amounts of energy to continue growing and maturing. Research published on Thursday says that current AI energy usage stands at 20% of global data-center power demand and will rise to 50% by year’s end.
There are two ways that the problem can be addressed. There needs to be more efficient AI technologies and there have to be innovations in the energy sector.
Solar and wind power ain’t gonna cut it, Gavin. The massive amount of energy needed to power AI into the future must be realized, or the promise of AI changing our lives will die aborning.
AI and bitcoin mining are draining current energy output at an alarming rate. “A new report by the International Energy Agency finds that 50 percent of United States electricity consumption growth by 2030 will come from AI demand,” writes City Journal’s John Garnett.
“The money that bitcoin miners had to get to where they are today is peanuts compared to the money that Google and Microsoft and all these big tech companies are pouring in [to AI],” says Alex de Vries-Gao, the founder of Digiconomist, a research company. “This is just escalating a lot faster, and it’s a much bigger threat.”
It’s also becoming clear that Big Tech is going to have to choose whether to continue to adhere to its woke environmental goals or continue the AI revolution.
The development of AI is already having an impact on Big Tech’s climate goals. Tech giants have acknowledged in recent sustainability reports that AI is largely responsible for driving up their energy use. Google’s greenhouse gas emissions, for instance, have increased 48 percent since 2019, complicating the company’s goals of reaching net zero by 2030.
“As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands from the greater intensity of AI compute,” Google’s 2024 sustainability report reads.
If push comes to shove (and current trends suggest that will happen sooner rather than later), Google, Microsoft, and other companies driving the AI revolution will honor their environmental promises in the breach. They would be betraying their fiduciary responsibility if they allowed other companies that don’t care a fig about climate change to get a big jump on them.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is the undisputed leader in making hardware that can handle the high computing demands of AI.
De Vries-Gao used analyst estimates, earnings call transcripts, and device details to put together an approximate estimate of TSMC’s production capacity. He then looked at publicly available electricity consumption profiles of AI hardware and estimates on utilization rates of that hardware—which can vary based on what it’s being used for—to arrive at a rough figure of just how much of global data-center demand is taken up by AI. De Vries-Gao calculates that without increased production, AI will consume up to 82 terrawatt-hours of electricity this year—roughly around the same as the annual electricity consumption of a country like Switzerland. If production capacity for AI hardware doubles this year, as analysts have projected it will, demand could increase at a similar rate, representing almost half of all data center demand by the end of the year.
De Vries-Gao points to the problem that even with all this detailed information, facts about energy use by AI are still scarce.
“You really have to deep-dive into the semiconductor supply chain to be able to make any sensible statement about the energy demand of AI,” De Vries-Gao says. “If these big tech companies were just publishing the same information that Google was publishing three years ago, we would have a pretty good indicator” of AI’s energy use.
Related: We Need to Heed Eisenhower’s Warning About a ‘Scientific Elite’
Where will this additional energy output come from? Certainly, innovation is going to be necessary. But when government talks of “innovation,” they mean subsidies to pick and choose winners.
There’s a better way:
In contrast, the U.S. deregulated natural gas markets in the 1980s, motivating entrepreneurs to invest in and develop new energy technologies. The market worked its magic, and innovations like hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling revolutionized the American energy portfolio. Today, the United States is a world leader in natural gas extraction, and Americans benefit from a seemingly endless supply of cheap energy. Due to its low cost, natural gas went from fueling 20 percent of domestic electricity generation in the 1980s to 40 percent today.
As long as market forces dictate supply and demand, AI will receive the energy it needs to thrive.
If not, other nations and companies will leap ahead, leaving American industry in the dust.
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