AI is exhausting the power grid

The only data in the article that helps to understand the scale in context is this:<p>&gt; It found data centers will account for 8 percent of total electricity use in the United States by 2030, a near tripling of their share today. New solar and wind energy will meet about 40 percent of that new power demand from data centers, the forecast said, while the rest will come from a vast expansion in the burning of natural gas. The new emissions created would be comparable to that of putting 15.7 million additional gas-powered cars on the road.<p>So <i>all</i> data center power (not just &quot;AI&quot;) is currently 3-4% of US electricity consumption, and is expected to grow to 8% in 6 years.

Duplicate of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40748225">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40748225</a> except that that one links to the version of this article at the <i>Washington Post</i>, which MSN is merely syndicating.<p>As I said in comments on that one: This article claiming that &quot;AI is exhausting the power grid&quot; is surprisingly light on evidence that AI is exhausting the power grid. (In fact, I think it contains <i>no</i> such evidence, though it does contain evidence that tech companies have datacentres that use electricity and seems to think that that is an exciting and damning discovery.)

Energy would be a non-issue if we&#x27;d have went full-in on nuclear. It would be so cheap we would all be heating our houses with resistive heaters and running all the AI farms we want in our basements without a second thought. Instead we let stupidity win.

This and all other articles misrepresent current energy consumption, then wildly predict the future from that baseline. The overwhelming trend is towards efficiency as comically inefficient corporate facilities are shut down in favor of cloud computing. Furthermore, half of current &quot;data center power usage&quot; is actually due to cellular radio networks, and that isn&#x27;t growing due to AI.

I found a DGX H100 for $300k. The internet tells me such a server uses 10kw. I found a 30kw solar system with 90kw of lithium battery storage for $70k. At utility scale I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s any risk of AI causing a problem to the grid when a dedicated supply of power for an AI server can clearly be purchased for less than 20% of the system cost. (Realistically I expect the lifespan of solar panels and the batteries is easily 2x-4x the lifespan of the server, so it&#x27;s probably closer to 5% or even lower.)<p>Solar and batteries make power basically a solved problem. Relative to GPUs it&#x27;s cheap and scalable.

“If we work together, we can unlock AI’s game-changing abilities to help create the net zero, climate resilient and nature positive works that we so urgently need,” Microsoft said in a statement.

It would take a miracle for us to stop wasting energy on nonsense.

Human brain is a million times more energy-efficient than AI.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nist.gov&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;taking-measure&#x2F;brain-inspired-computing-can-help-us-create-faster-more-energy-efficient" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nist.gov&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;taking-measure&#x2F;brain-inspired-com...</a>

This is another reason I am learning CLIPS. It implements a form of the Rete algorithm. A Rete network provides the same benefits of a neural network without the bells-and-whistles, and thus would be a great candidate for anyone who thinks they could benefit from the reasoning power provided by LLMs.

Probably the next US president was just talking about this 2 days ago at the 18:00 mark:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;clip&#x2F;UgkxHblFYiaMkxzLEg9jCMffFAH2rMIrn6tZ?si=tCE7bCkzvjjbP9yK" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;clip&#x2F;UgkxHblFYiaMkxzLEg9jCMffFAH2rMIrn6t...</a>

First Bitcoin and now AI.

Good stuff. 50% of earth energy consumption will be in AI soon.

you&#x27;d think tech couldn&#x27;t invent something more useless and long time value destroying than cryptocurrency<p>but they delivered again

This is how proof of work dies, watch.

If only there was a power source that could be carbon free and constant (fission) that could be married to a variable load (AI and Bitcoin) to maintain peak efficiency

Typical techbro solution: Invent fusion. Thing is, you can take advantage of fusion power <i>today</i> with PV panels you can buy at Home Depot.<p>I realize it&#x27;s not quite that simple. You need land, you need sunny skies, you need storage, etc. But all these problems are solvable with today&#x27;s technology, while fusion reactors are most assuredly not.

Don&#x27;t stop it yet, we need more stupid LLMs.