And that's just an example, there are many power-related deals of similar magnitude.
The companies building out capacity certainly believe that AI is going to use as much power as we are told. We are told this not on the basis of hypothetical speculation, but on the basis of billions of real dollars being spent on real power capacity for real data centers by real people who'd really rather keep the money in question. Previous hypotheses not backed by billions of dollars are not comparable predictions.
> The companies building out capacity certainly believe that AI is going to use as much power as we are told.
The same could be said of dark fiber laid during the dot com boom, or unused railroads, etc. Spending during a boom is not indicative of properly recognized future demand of resources.
It's not future demand, it's current demand. Microsoft has already said they're power blocked rather than chip blocked.
Please note how I say current demand, and don't over project as to what my opinion about future demand is. I think there's a small, but reasonable chance that demand will sink for some reason or another in the next few years, and I think there's a pretty decent chance that in the next five years someone will come up with some way to make these things an order of magnitude or more more efficient, which would crash their electricity demands. But it's not a hypothetical "we need power in two years", or at least, not just that... it's we need more power now.
There's a big difference between "I may hypothetically need some more capacity later, I'd better go buy it now" and "I concretely need more capacity right now".
Yes, big bets tell us something but they are not a crystal ball. Some of the same companies hired lots of people post-pandemic and then reversed. People who control enormous amounts of money can make risky bets that turn out to be wrong.
1. Microsoft is not a "dotcom startup". We live in a different, much more consolidated tech world of companies that either balloon to become behemoths or are bought by existing behemoths.
2. Power and data centers can be used for other things than AI.
3. They might turn out to be wrong and not need the deal/power. For companies sitting on a shitload of cash that would be an inconvenience whereas not investing and then later having to beg for electricity amounts to losing the race.
> But we have been here before. Predictions of this kind have been made ever since the emergence of the Internet
I don't think I live in the same world as the author. Ever since the emergence of the Internet, "stuff related to IT" has been using more and more energy.
It's like saying "5G won't use as much electricity as we are told! In fact 5G is more efficient than 4G". Yep, except that 5G enables us to use a lot more of it, and therefore we use more electricity.
If you're using more of it, because it's replacing corporate travel and going into the office and driving across town to see your friends and family and facetiming instead, then you are still MASSIVELY reducing your total energy.
It's not like the majority of electricity use by computers is complete waste.
You can poo-hoo and say I don't want to live in the digital world, and want to spend more time flying around the world to work with people in person or actually see my mom, or buy physical paper in stores that's shipped there and write physical words on it and have the USPS physically ship it, but that's just wildly, almost unfathomably, less efficient.
If Google didn't exist, who knows how many more books I'd need to own, how much time I'd spend buying those books, how much energy I'd spend going to the stores to pick them up, or having them shipped.
It's almost certainly a lot less than how much energy I spend using Google.
While we all like to think that Facebook is a complete waste of time, what would you be spending your time doing otherwise? Probably something that requires more energy than close to nothing looking at memes on your phone.
Not to mention, presumably, at least some people are getting some value from even the most wasteful pits of the Internet.
You also seem to live in a different world. I urge you to start getting informed on what needs to be done in order to build hardware (hint: it does not grow on trees).
> then you are still MASSIVELY reducing your total energy.
Instead of using all those caps, look at the numbers: we have them. We use more and more energy.
> but that's just wildly, almost unfathomably, less efficient.
Not sure if you really need the hint, but you shouldn't spend more time flying around the world.
> It's almost certainly a lot less than how much energy I spend using Google.
It is a fact that it isn't. Before Google, people were using less energy than we are now, period.
> Probably something that requires more energy than close to nothing looking at memes on your phone.
The industry that gets you your memes on the hardware you call phone is anything but "close to nothing" when it comes to energy. I would say that you are in bad faith, but with all those examples you've giving, it seems like you are just uninformed.
So let me be blunt: your kids will most likely die because of how much energy we use (from one of the plethora of problems coming from that). At this point, we cannot do much about it, but the very least would be to be aware of it.
Nothing forces the rebound effect to dominate. Computers grow cheaper, we rebound by buying ones with higher capacity, but the overall price still shrinks. I bet the computer you used to post today cost much less than Colossus.
Similarly, nothing forces AI or 5G to use more power than whatever you would have done instead. You can stream films via 5G that you might not have done via 4G, but you might've streamed via WLAN or perhaps cat5 cable instead. The rebound effect doesn't force 5G to use more power than WLAN/GBE. Or more power than driving to a cinema, if you want to compare really widely. The film you stream makes it comparable, not?
Human nature does. We're like a gas, and we fill to expand the space we're in. If technology uses less power, in general, we'll just use more of it until we hit whatever natural limits are present. (usually cost, or availability) I'm not sure I'm a proponent of usage taxes, but they definitely have the right idea; people will just keep doing more things until it becomes too expensive or they are otherwise restricted. The problem you run into is how the public reacts when "they" are trying to force a bunch of limitations on you that you didn't previously need to live with. It's politically impossible, even in a case where it's the right choice.
> Similarly, nothing forces AI or 5G to use more power than whatever you would have done instead
Am I missing something or has the need to vast GPU horsepower been solved ? Those requirements were not in DC's before and they're only going up. Whatever way you look at it, there's got to be an increase in power consumption somewhere no ?
There is some limit to the rebound effect because people only have so many hours in the day, but we’re nowhere near the ceiling of how much AI compute people could use.
Note how many people pay for the $200/month plans from Anthropic, OAI etc. and still hit limits because they constantly spend $8000 worth of tokens letting the agents burn and churn. It’s pretty obvious that as compute gets cheaper via hardware improvements and power buildout, usage is going to climb exponentially as people go “eh, let the agent just run on autopilot, who cares if it takes 2MM tokens to do [simple task]”.
I think for the foreseeable future we should consider the rebound effect in this sector to be in full force and not expect any decreases in power usage for a long time.
Do we use more electricity because of 5G? I confess I'd assume modern phones and repeater networks use less power than older ones. Even at large.
I can easily agree that phones that have internet capabilities use more, as a whole, than those that didn't. The infrastructure needs were very different. But, especially if you are comparing to 4G technology, much of that infrastructure already had to distribute content that was driving the extra use.
I would think this would be like cars. If you had taken the estimates of how much pollution vehicles did 40 years ago and assume that that was going to be constant even as the number of cars went up, you'd probably assume we are living in the worst air imaginable. Instead, even gas cars got far better as time went on.
Doesn't mean the problem went away, of course. And some sources of the polution, like tires, did get worse as total makeup as we scaled up. Hopefully we can find ways to make that better, as well.
> Do we use more electricity because of 5G? I confess I'd assume modern phones and repeater networks use less power than older ones. Even at large.
If we did exactly the same with 5G than what we did with 4G, it would be more efficient.
But why do we develop 5G? Because we can do more. It is more efficient, but we do much more, so we increase our energy consumption. This is called the "rebound effect". It's observed for every. single. technology.
As a data point, I turn 5G off on my phone and get several hours more battery life using 4G. I'm pretty sure the higher bandwidth is consuming more energy, especially since 5G works at shorter distances and probably needs the power to stay connected to cell towers.
The phones, towers, and networks are only the tip of the power iceberg. How much electricity are we burning to run the servers to service the requests that all these 5G phones can now make because of all the wonderfully cheap wireless connectivity?
"Yet throughout this period, the actual share of electricity use accounted for by the IT sector has hovered between 1 and 2 per cent, accounting for less than 1 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions."
But presumably the total use of energy has been going up, so while the relative percentage might be the same, I doubt very much that the absolute quantity of GWhr/year has stayed the same.
It's bad faith to talk about greenhouse gas emissions without taking into account the indirect contributions. When you use a computer, you cannot only account for the electricity that goes into the computer that is sitting on your desk.
You have to account for all the energy that went into extracting the materials from the ground, building the electronics, shipping it accross the world, and then the electricity to operate it.
> By contrast, the unglamorous and largely disregarded business of making cement accounts for around 7 per cent of global emissions.
Oh, that's not a good example of the point they're trying to make. The emissions from concrete are a point of major concern and are frequently discussed. A ton of effort is being put into trying to reduce the problem, and there are widespread calls to reduce the use of the material as much as possible.
The only useful point that they make is that predictions about unending growth are always wrong in detail. Every actual hockey stick turns into a sigmoid, then falls. Meanwhile, a new hockey stick comes along.
But AI training has been behaving like Bitcoin mining, which constantly increases the difficulty. AI companies so far have been having to release costlier and costlier models to keep up with the Joneses. We don’t want the final iteration to be a Dyson sphere around the sun or the black hole at the center of our galaxy so Gemini 10,000 Pro can tell us “Let there be light.” Or maybe we do, I don’t know.
In general there seems to be a big given in the argument that I don't think is obvious:
> At the other end of the policy spectrum, advocates of “degrowth” don’t want to concede that the explosive growth of the information economy is sustainable, unlike the industrial economy of the 20th century.
This seems to imply we all must agree that the industrial economy of the 20th century was sustainable, and that strikes me as an odd point of agreement to try to make. Isn't it just sidestepping the whole point?
Hopefully the panic continues and we get a lot of extra electricity, ideally via nuclear, wind, solar - and then if AI is a flop at least we get big progress on global warming.
How does an urgent need for more energy use lead to overall cleaner energy? Won’t it also accelerate unclean energy use to saturation, even if additional clean sources are needed for capacity?
“You may not know about the issue but I bet you reckon something, so why not tell us what you reckon. Let us enjoy the full majesty of your uninformed ad-hoc reckon” - David Mitchell.
"Let us enjoy the full majesty of your uninformed ad-hoc reckon, by going to bbc.co.uk… clicking on ‘what I reckon’ and then simply beating on the keyboard with your fists or head."
> But far from demanding more electricity personal computers have become more efficient with laptops mostly replacing large standalone boxes, and software improvements reducing waste.
If only it was true, I reckon we’re using multiple-orders of magnitude more computational per $ of business objectives simply because of the crazy abstractions. For example, I know of multiple small HFT firms that are crypto market makers with their trading bots in Python. Many banks in my country have excel macros on top of SQL extensions on top of COBOL. We’ve not reduced waste in software but rather quite the opposite.
I don’t think this is super relevant to the articles point but I think it’s an under discussed topic.
Excel has already added a =COPILOT() function. Imagine the waste of all those formulas that probably amount to some basic mathematical formula that could be run on a 386.
AI helped me fix my own car, no new parts, no driving to the stealership, no comfy lobby to light, no extra building to heat, no IT system to book me into...
It's my opinion AI, like many technologies since the 1950s, will lead to more dematerialization of the economy meaning it will net net save electricity and be "greener".
This is an extension of what steven pinker says in Enlightenment now.
What’s the energy profile of running inference in a typical ChatGPT prompt compared to:
- doing a google search and loading a linked webpage
- taking a photo with your smartphone and uploading it to social media for sharing
- playing Fortnite for 20 minutes
- hosting a Zoom conference with 15 people
- sending an email to a hundred colleagues
I’d be curious. AI inference is massively centralised, so of course the data centres will be using a lot of energy, but less centralised use cases may be less power efficient from a wholistic perspective.
> A ChatGPT prompt uses 0.3 Wh, which is approximately how much energy a Google search took in 2009.
That's the number their CEO put out, but AFAIK it is completely unverified (they did not provide any background as to how it was calculated). To believe it is an article of faith at this point.
What is concrete and verifiable are the large deals being struck between AI model providers and energy providers - often to be supplied via fossil fuels.
These are the kinds of questions we need pursued to develop better insight into the overall societal impact of current and near-future LLMs. Energy usage is a critical measure of any technology. The tradeoffs between alternate use cases should be modeled as accurately as possible, including all significant externalities.
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And that's just an example, there are many power-related deals of similar magnitude.
The companies building out capacity certainly believe that AI is going to use as much power as we are told. We are told this not on the basis of hypothetical speculation, but on the basis of billions of real dollars being spent on real power capacity for real data centers by real people who'd really rather keep the money in question. Previous hypotheses not backed by billions of dollars are not comparable predictions.
The same could be said of dark fiber laid during the dot com boom, or unused railroads, etc. Spending during a boom is not indicative of properly recognized future demand of resources.
Please note how I say current demand, and don't over project as to what my opinion about future demand is. I think there's a small, but reasonable chance that demand will sink for some reason or another in the next few years, and I think there's a pretty decent chance that in the next five years someone will come up with some way to make these things an order of magnitude or more more efficient, which would crash their electricity demands. But it's not a hypothetical "we need power in two years", or at least, not just that... it's we need more power now.
There's a big difference between "I may hypothetically need some more capacity later, I'd better go buy it now" and "I concretely need more capacity right now".
There are new commitments.
Microsoft: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-goes-nuclear-bigges...
Google: https://interestingengineering.com/energy/google-gen4-nuclea...
Amazon: https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/16/amazon-jumps-on-nuclear-po...
OpenAI/Sam Altman: https://interestingengineering.com/energy/oklo-to-generate-1...
More: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116339/ai-nucle...
2. Power and data centers can be used for other things than AI.
3. They might turn out to be wrong and not need the deal/power. For companies sitting on a shitload of cash that would be an inconvenience whereas not investing and then later having to beg for electricity amounts to losing the race.
I don't think I live in the same world as the author. Ever since the emergence of the Internet, "stuff related to IT" has been using more and more energy.
It's like saying "5G won't use as much electricity as we are told! In fact 5G is more efficient than 4G". Yep, except that 5G enables us to use a lot more of it, and therefore we use more electricity.
It's called the rebound effect.
It's not like the majority of electricity use by computers is complete waste.
You can poo-hoo and say I don't want to live in the digital world, and want to spend more time flying around the world to work with people in person or actually see my mom, or buy physical paper in stores that's shipped there and write physical words on it and have the USPS physically ship it, but that's just wildly, almost unfathomably, less efficient.
If Google didn't exist, who knows how many more books I'd need to own, how much time I'd spend buying those books, how much energy I'd spend going to the stores to pick them up, or having them shipped.
It's almost certainly a lot less than how much energy I spend using Google.
While we all like to think that Facebook is a complete waste of time, what would you be spending your time doing otherwise? Probably something that requires more energy than close to nothing looking at memes on your phone.
Not to mention, presumably, at least some people are getting some value from even the most wasteful pits of the Internet.
Not everything is Bitcoin.
> then you are still MASSIVELY reducing your total energy.
Instead of using all those caps, look at the numbers: we have them. We use more and more energy.
> but that's just wildly, almost unfathomably, less efficient.
Not sure if you really need the hint, but you shouldn't spend more time flying around the world.
> It's almost certainly a lot less than how much energy I spend using Google.
It is a fact that it isn't. Before Google, people were using less energy than we are now, period.
> Probably something that requires more energy than close to nothing looking at memes on your phone.
The industry that gets you your memes on the hardware you call phone is anything but "close to nothing" when it comes to energy. I would say that you are in bad faith, but with all those examples you've giving, it seems like you are just uninformed.
So let me be blunt: your kids will most likely die because of how much energy we use (from one of the plethora of problems coming from that). At this point, we cannot do much about it, but the very least would be to be aware of it.
Similarly, nothing forces AI or 5G to use more power than whatever you would have done instead. You can stream films via 5G that you might not have done via 4G, but you might've streamed via WLAN or perhaps cat5 cable instead. The rebound effect doesn't force 5G to use more power than WLAN/GBE. Or more power than driving to a cinema, if you want to compare really widely. The film you stream makes it comparable, not?
Human nature does. We're like a gas, and we fill to expand the space we're in. If technology uses less power, in general, we'll just use more of it until we hit whatever natural limits are present. (usually cost, or availability) I'm not sure I'm a proponent of usage taxes, but they definitely have the right idea; people will just keep doing more things until it becomes too expensive or they are otherwise restricted. The problem you run into is how the public reacts when "they" are trying to force a bunch of limitations on you that you didn't previously need to live with. It's politically impossible, even in a case where it's the right choice.
Am I missing something or has the need to vast GPU horsepower been solved ? Those requirements were not in DC's before and they're only going up. Whatever way you look at it, there's got to be an increase in power consumption somewhere no ?
Not sure what to say to that. Yeah, it would be great if we didn't put so much resources into destroying our own world. I agree.
The fact is that rebound effect very much dominates everything we do. I'm not saying it should, I'm saying it does. It's an observation.
Note how many people pay for the $200/month plans from Anthropic, OAI etc. and still hit limits because they constantly spend $8000 worth of tokens letting the agents burn and churn. It’s pretty obvious that as compute gets cheaper via hardware improvements and power buildout, usage is going to climb exponentially as people go “eh, let the agent just run on autopilot, who cares if it takes 2MM tokens to do [simple task]”.
I think for the foreseeable future we should consider the rebound effect in this sector to be in full force and not expect any decreases in power usage for a long time.
I can easily agree that phones that have internet capabilities use more, as a whole, than those that didn't. The infrastructure needs were very different. But, especially if you are comparing to 4G technology, much of that infrastructure already had to distribute content that was driving the extra use.
I would think this would be like cars. If you had taken the estimates of how much pollution vehicles did 40 years ago and assume that that was going to be constant even as the number of cars went up, you'd probably assume we are living in the worst air imaginable. Instead, even gas cars got far better as time went on.
Doesn't mean the problem went away, of course. And some sources of the polution, like tires, did get worse as total makeup as we scaled up. Hopefully we can find ways to make that better, as well.
If we did exactly the same with 5G than what we did with 4G, it would be more efficient.
But why do we develop 5G? Because we can do more. It is more efficient, but we do much more, so we increase our energy consumption. This is called the "rebound effect". It's observed for every. single. technology.
"Yet throughout this period, the actual share of electricity use accounted for by the IT sector has hovered between 1 and 2 per cent, accounting for less than 1 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions."
You have to account for all the energy that went into extracting the materials from the ground, building the electronics, shipping it accross the world, and then the electricity to operate it.
Deleted Comment
Oh, that's not a good example of the point they're trying to make. The emissions from concrete are a point of major concern and are frequently discussed. A ton of effort is being put into trying to reduce the problem, and there are widespread calls to reduce the use of the material as much as possible.
> At the other end of the policy spectrum, advocates of “degrowth” don’t want to concede that the explosive growth of the information economy is sustainable, unlike the industrial economy of the 20th century.
This seems to imply we all must agree that the industrial economy of the 20th century was sustainable, and that strikes me as an odd point of agreement to try to make. Isn't it just sidestepping the whole point?
Also its called climate change now.
If only it was true, I reckon we’re using multiple-orders of magnitude more computational per $ of business objectives simply because of the crazy abstractions. For example, I know of multiple small HFT firms that are crypto market makers with their trading bots in Python. Many banks in my country have excel macros on top of SQL extensions on top of COBOL. We’ve not reduced waste in software but rather quite the opposite.
I don’t think this is super relevant to the articles point but I think it’s an under discussed topic.
Indeed. But that is because we optimized (and are still optimizing) for speed of development, not much else.
It's my opinion AI, like many technologies since the 1950s, will lead to more dematerialization of the economy meaning it will net net save electricity and be "greener".
This is an extension of what steven pinker says in Enlightenment now.
AI energy use is negligible compared with other everyday activities. This is a great article on the subject:
https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversa...
The same author has published a series of articles that go into a lot of depth when it comes to AI energy and water use:
https://andymasley.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-environment
That's the number their CEO put out, but AFAIK it is completely unverified (they did not provide any background as to how it was calculated). To believe it is an article of faith at this point.
What is concrete and verifiable are the large deals being struck between AI model providers and energy providers - often to be supplied via fossil fuels.