Artificial Intelligence Is Putting Ever-Increasing Demands on Our Resources
Power prompt.
That important email to your boss. That snippet of code for your website. That screenplay you’ve had in your head for years. All that work you’re doing with artificial intelligence is creating a very real problem: it’s consuming an astounding amount of electricity.
Recent estimates suggest a typical query from ChatGPT consumes about the same power as it takes to light a standard seven-watt LED bulb for about 20 minutes—roughly 10 times as much as a Google search. The International Energy Agency estimates that by 2026, global data centres’ yearly consumption could reach 1,000 terawatt-hours, approximately what the entire country of Japan consumes in the same time frame.
You don’t need the latest accelerator chip to explain how such demand might overwhelm our aging power grid. And because generating all that juice produces a lot of excess heat, it may also put unprecedented pressure on our fresh water resources as we try to keep all those data centres and storage systems from burning up. Water use at Google data centres rose 20 per cent between 2021 and 2022. Microsoft’s rose by 34 per cent.
Governments are waking up to the problem. In February, the U.S. Senate introduced a bill enabling the feds to track and assess AI’s impact on the environment. The European Union recently approved a similar law, forcing AI companies to report their energy and resource use starting next year, presumably as the first step toward regulation.
Big tech has taken notice too. Over the past several months, many Silicon Valley companies have signed contracts to secure long-term access to clean electricity. Amazon has invested in over 500 solar and wind projects around the world. Google is pouring over $1 billion into a solar facility in Taiwan. OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman along with venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Atomic recently provided $20 million of seed funding to a tech startup developing solar-powered thermal batteries. Meanwhile, Microsoft inked a deal with Canadian alternative asset giant Brookfield Asset Management to invest up to $10 billion for the development of 10.5 gigawatts of capacity across the U.S. and Europe—about the amount required to power 10 million households.
Will these efforts be enough to power our insatiable need for AI-generated memes, wedding speeches, and weeknight recipes? That’s a query even the best minds—organic or artificial—can’t answer yet.
