This morning I have read on the Italian newspaper IlSole24Ore that “Google and Microsoft consume more electricity than tens of countries“. This follows an article I read in May 2024 on Forbes: “AI Is Pushing The World Toward An Energy Crisis” and, in particular: The data centers used to train and operate these models (e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT) require vast amounts of electricity. GPT-4, for example, required over 50 GigaWatt-hours, approximately 0.02% of the electricity California generates in a year, and 50 times the amount it took to train GPT-3, the previous iteration.
In these days there are a lot of discussions on AI, its potential benefits for individuals, companies, businesses and the whole human society. While a few months ago, many investors were prepared to put a lot of money on any start-up that could claim to have found super-advanced AI solutions, now they have become more sceptical about those results and have started to scrutinise more deeply every statement from companies: they require solid proves before allocating money on anything AI-based.
This affects also Nvidia that, despite being the 2nd most valued company in the world, has seen its share price decrease steeply because of some progress uncertainties.
In this editorial I don’t intend to discuss the good or the bad of AI, its ethics, how human beings should be protected against the AI development or else. What worries me is the environmental effect of the huge increase in the calculation power required by IT systems to allow the development of AI-based solutions.
A few years ago, Google was enquired about the incredibly high use of energy to provide timely outputs of Google searches. The enquiry was so important that a few months later Google felt the need to published news and pictures about how they were cooling their system (with water, far more efficient than fans) and the electricity produced for it was green (mainly, through PV panels).
This is the issue: on the one hand we receive messages about saving energy, increasing the production of clean/green/renewable energy, increasing systems efficiency, etc. while on the other hand there is an unbelievably high use of energy to make our IT-based world work well and, due to AI efforts, its need is getting bigger and bigger. Do the benefits brought by AI (at least) balance this increasing use of energy?
We cannot cover all countryside with PV panels as much as we cannot fill in sea shores with wind power stations because the need of green energy is steadily more. Something has to be properly assessed.
Stefano Mainero
EPN Consulting + EPN Consulting Research and Innovation Founder & CEO
Article written by human beings without any use of AI. EPN Consulting Ltd. copyright 2024