Can clean energy handle the AI boom?
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सबटाइटल्स (200 segments)
DownloadI 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
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below that big jump from 2022 to 2026
six is thanks to Rising cloud storage
and cryptocurrency electricity demands
but it's also because 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
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toward
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belonging
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also
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inside
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specific
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Used to refer to the person or people that the speaker is addressing. It is the second-person pronoun used for both singular and plural subjects and objects.
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Used to identify a specific person, thing, or idea that is physically close to the speaker or has just been mentioned. It can also refer to the present time or a situation that is currently happening.
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Description
How our digital lives are impacting our climate goals. This video is presented by Klaviyo. Klaviyo has no editorial influence on our work, but their support makes videos like these possible....
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