Is AI the Next Big Climate-Change Threat? We Haven’t a Clue.
Dire warnings are being issued about AI’s energy needs, but new chip technologies and even AI itself could help keep demands for more electrical power in check
By Martin Giles
At a recent conference in San Francisco, Gary Dickerson took the stage and made a bold prediction. The chief executive of Applied Materials, which is a big supplier to the semiconductor industry, warned that in the absence of significant innovation in materials, chip manufacturing and design, data centers’ AI workloads could account for a tenth of the world’s electricity usage by 2025.
Today, the millions of data centers around the world soak up a little less than 2% — and that statistic encompasses all kinds of workloads handled on their vast arrays of servers. Applied Materials estimates that servers running AI currently account for just 0.1% of global electricity consumption.
Other tech executives are sounding an alarm too. Anders Andrae of Huawei thinks data centers could end up consuming a tenth of the globe’s electricity by 2025, though his estimate covers all their uses, not just AI.
