Can clean energy handle the AI boom?

I spent some time recently reading through a big spreadsheet of questions submitted by vox's audience members and one of them caught my eye it was from Cathy a retired school teacher in New York City what is the question that you wanted us to answer so the question is can green energy even begin to handle the increased demands that Ai and crypto and cloud storage are going to put on our Energy System it's a good question I've done some reporting on AI but I've never thought much of the climate impact of all the AI products we're

increasingly using and all of our digital belongings like photos and documents and emails getting stockpiled in servers around the world they need a lot of electricity and the electricity has to come from somewhere this is all happening while the climate crisis demands we use less energy not invent new ways to use more of it I think our climate goals already feel pretty impossible to me but now it's almost like we haven't changed the goal poost we've changed the entire game so let's get to the bottom of [Music] this within Cathy's big question is a more

basic one about how much electricity our digital lives require at first I was thrown off that Kathy mentioned things like cloud storage and Ai and cryptocurrency in one category but then I realized that their electricity demands happen at the same place data centers ultimately you're talking about machines loaded up in large facilities who generate computations and they need power a lot of it they need water uh they need space I spoke to Alex D he runs a research site called dig Economist where he's dug into this exact topic data centers are massive often windowless warehouses

that house thousands of servers that run virtually non-stop some of the bigger data centers are as big as four football fields and use as much electricity at any given time as 880,000 households there are more than 8,000 data centers around the world and the US has more than any other country in 2022 data centers artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies made up about 2% of total Global electricity demand but by 2026 that number is expected to double which is like adding the amount of electricity used by the entire country of Sweden I'll explain why in a minute

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of the AI boom We Know AI requires a ton of computational power but it turns out that the amount of electricity it uses is a really difficult question to answer AI is a huge umbrella term that includes everything from basic statistical models that detect patterns and data to generative AI that creates text and images and videos that's the most computationally intensive kind the thing is the handful of private tech companies that dominate the AI field don't really disclose how much of their energy use is dedicated to AI specifically if you look at Google's latest environmental

report it clearly states they absolutely don't want to make a distinction between regular workloads and AI specific workloads and these company's AI models are mostly closed Source meaning no one knows exactly how they are built this has left some researchers to try to piece it together on their own researchers looked at an open source large language model called Bloom that has roughly the same amount of parameters as gpt3 and found that training something like gpt3 required almost 1300 megawatt hours of electricity about as much power as consumed by 130 homes in the US for 1

year today large language models like GPT 4 have hundreds of billions of parameters if not a trillion and researchers say that the computational power required to train these models is expected to double every 9 months so far it has mostly been large language models driving the AI energy boom of course that could change going forward now we see AI on the rise for image generation and also specifically video generation so far we talked about training a large language model researchers also looked at energy use from people actually using it it's been estimated by myself and

others that a single jet GPT interaction would take like 3 Watt hours which is comparable to running a low Loom and LED bulb for one hour so on itself it doesn't sound like a whole lot but of course hey it's the volume that matters this is 10 times more than a standard Google search and of course if you're talking about millions or billions of interactions the numbers start to stack up quickly Alex took another research approach by looking at the hardware used for AI training and use over 95% of the AI industry uses servers made

by the company NVIDIA they could sell one 1.5 million of their servers by 2027 he multiplied that by the information Nvidia publicizes about each of their servers energy demand he found that data centers devoted to AI alone could consume around 100 terawatt hours of electricity per year or about the same as his home country of the Netherlands there's a big part of Kathy's question I haven't gotten to yet can renewable energy meet the surging demand from the world's data centers the good news is that using green energy is the stated goal of a lot of

these companies both Google and Microsoft have made pledges to be Net Zero by 2030 but there are signs that AI is disrupting those plants that's because solar and wind energy can't produce electricity all of the time and these data centers need to be running all of the time in most cases they will just have a backup connection to the power grid which will uh have fossil fuels on it it's not just that data centers are being built at a r that renewable energy infrastructure can't keep up with it can take a year to build a

data center but many more years to get a solar or wind farm on an electrical grid Google's 2024 sustainability report showed that the company's emissions Rose by 48% from 2019 to 2023 in large part due to its data center energy consumption suggesting that integrating AI into their products can make reducing their emissions challenging there's already evidence in the US that coal plants that were meant to close are staying open because of data centers electricity demands and that state utilities are building new natural gas plants for the same reason but even if these tech companies can

look good on their sustainability reports and get to Net Zero they's still a problem the thing is that our renewable energy Supply globally is limited so if we attributing an increasing part of that to the data center industry the consequences that there's less Renewables available for everything else that probably will mean that on the whole we will end up using more fossil fuels anyway with all this context the answer to Cathy's question is that for right now we aren't prepared for renewable energy to meet the increasing demand of the world's data centers so what do

we do about this as users it would be extremely difficult to opt out of backing up our data on the cloud or even refrain from using AI I think AI is embedded in so many things that I'm not sure I will have the option to say I'm not using it you know I'm out researchers like Alex say the best place to start is to force more transparency from these tech companies in the EU the AI act doesn't really Force tech companies to disclose anything with regard to the environment and that's the EU not even talking

about the us yet which is lagging behind a bit on this matter some environmental organizations and local communities are calling for moratoriums on data centers and some researchers have proposed the idea of an Energy Efficiency rating so companies and consumers can choose data centers that are the most sustainable we could also hope that the servers and data centers will keep getting more energy efficient but more than anything this issue emphasizes how desperately we need to be scaling up renewable energy and fast not only to meet the ever increasing data center demands but so there's plenty

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