Energy Demand -- January 27, 2024

Locator: 46663TECH.

Link here.

The WSJ:  December 15, 2023.

Some experts project that global electricity consumption for AI systems could soon require adding the equivalent of a small country’s worth of power generation to our planet. That demand comes as the world is trying to electrify as much as possible and decarbonize how that power is generated in the face of climate change.

Since 2010, power consumption for data centers has remained nearly flat, as a proportion of global electricity production, at about 1% of that figure, according to the International Energy Agency. But the rapid adoption of AI could represent a sea change in how much electricity is required to run the internet—specifically, the data centers that comprise the cloud, and make possible all the digital services we rely on.

This means the AI industry is poised to run the equivalent of a planetary-scale experiment, according to experts both outside and inside the industry. This has some of them wringing their hands, while energy suppliers are practically salivating at the expected increase in demand.

And then this:

Constellation Energy, which has already agreed to sell Microsoft nuclear power for its data centers, projects that AI’s demand for power in the U.S. could be five to six times the total amount needed in the future to charge America’s electric vehicles.

Alex de Vries, a researcher at the School of Business and Economics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, projected in October that, based on current and future sales of microchips built by Nvidia specifically for AI, global power usage for AI systems could ratchet up to 15 gigawatts of continuous demand. Nvidia currently has more than 90% of the market share for AI-specific chips in data centers, making its output a proxy for power use by the industry as a whole.

That’s about the power consumption of the Netherlands, and would require the entire output of about 15 average-size nuclear power plants.