Electricity Demand Soars With AI & Crypto
June 19, 2024Energy ArticleIn the film The Terminator, a cybernetic assassin, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, is sent back from 2029 to 1984 in order to kill Sarah Connor because her as yet unborn son will save humanity from an extinction brought about by an Artificial Intelligence called Skynet.
When people discuss AI in the modern world, it is often this sort of scenario that the refer to when in reality AI might end up killing us all in a far less egregious manner. As a planet, we all face the very real problem of climate change, with many countries trying to cut back on its use of fossil fuels. Might the likes of AI and cryptocurrency cause more issues than its worth?
Why do AI & Cryptocurrency Use a Lot of Electricity?
In the majority of countries, there is a desire to cut down how much electricity we use given the fact that most of it is produced by burning fossil fuels. This, in turn, is causing the planet to die, with the rising temperatures around the globe contributing to global warming on an unprecedented scale. One of the major issues at hand is the fact that Cryptocurrency ‘mining’ and the use of Artificial Intelligence is only growing, with both being huge consumers of electricity.
Data centres, for example, are used for cloud computing and make up around 2.5% of the total power consumption in the United States of America.
Share of #nuclear power in the global energy mix is set to decline. Not because of less NPP, but of significant increases in electricity demand (developing countries, AI).
Even more NPP’s are needed then currently pledged worldwide!!#uranium #climatechange #greenenergy pic.twitter.com/ENkbkBVhdj
— UraInvestor (@PTOtrading) May 22, 2024
Over the coming years, that is expected to treble thanks to the fact that both cryptocurrency mining and the growth of Artificial Intelligence applications require huge amounts of energy to work efficiently. In the scientific journal Joule, it was predicted that AI applications could need as much power as the entire nation of the Netherlands by 2027, thanks to the fact that AI models are trained using terabytes of data.
Even the feeding of prompts to Artificial Intelligence programs uses a large amount of energy. Crypto mining, on the other hand, is a race to discover cryptocurrency that is won by pairing a lot of machines together.
AI is ‘Wildly Inefficient’
One of the big issues with Artificial Intelligence as a concept is that the models can’t use just part of the system. It isn’t as though there is one section of an AI for ‘maths’, one for ‘language’, one for ‘entertainment’. Instead, every time an AI model is queried the entire computer system behind it gets activated.
That obviously uses a large amount of energy which is, according to Sasha Luccioni at machine-learning company Hugging Face, ‘wildly inefficient from a computational perspective’. They said, “When you use Generative AI…it’s generating content from scratch, it’s essentially making up answers”.
Pretty incredible that 3 of the 5 best performing S&P 500 stocks year-to-date are Utilities stocks, including nuclear-power play Constellation $CEG.
Investors seem to be playing offense with defensives. It will take a lot of electricity to power all these AI ambitions. pic.twitter.com/yOc9eHlee0
— Bespoke (@bespokeinvest) May 14, 2024
According to a study, Generative AI uses around 33 times more energy than a machine that is using task-specific software. These computations are carried out in data centres that the vast majority of people don’t even know about, let alone worry about how much energy their consuming. Dr Luccioni said, “The could. You don’t even thinking about these huge boxes of metal that heat up and use so much energy”.
Data centres around the world used 460 terawatt hours of electricity in 2022. The International Energy Agency believes that this could be all much as 1,000 terawatt hours annually by 2026, which is roughly the same as that consumed the 125 million people that live in Japan.
Some Countries are Putting Stops in Place
In Dublin, Ireland, there is currently a ban on the construction of new data centres. Nearly a fifth of the entire energy consumption of the country is used by such places, all whilst Irish households are attempting to reduce their electricity usage.
It is a necessary stoppage to a huge amount of energy consumption, in spite of the fact that it could be lucrative to allow such companies to build more and more locations. In the United Kingdom, the boss of the National Grid said that data centre electricity demands are likely to ‘rise six-fold’ in a decade, with the growth of Artificial Intelligence being a large part of the reason for that.
At the same time, the use of AI is also helping reduce the amount of energy being used as the systems help to create more efficient chips. The Grace Blackwell, for example, is a chip that Nvidia has created using AI technology that will be able to produce work using a quarter of the energy needs that current chips make use of.
Even so, the companies responsible for AI and crypto mining are only trying to make more use of the technology behind it, not less. As a result, companies are setting themselves up where energy is at its cheapest, with Dr Luccioni looking to develop energy ratings for AI that people can use to determine which is best.
It is Damaging the Planet
Whilst there will always be some idiotic people who deny the science, such as those that inexplicably thought that Covid-19 was a hoax, the majority of people trust the experts. Those experts are keen to point out that Climate Change, sometimes referred to as Global Warming, is a real and present danger to the world.
The long-term heating of the earth’s surfacer has been taking place since the pre-industrial age but is only getting worse, thanks in no small part of the burning of fossil fuels for the likes of electricity usage. That warming of the planet is ‘unequivocally the result of human activity’, according to NASA.
JUST IN: 🇺🇸 Biden admin proposes 30% tax on electricity used for #Bitcoin & crypto mining – NY Times
It’s “hindering the transition to a low-emission energy future,” the White House says. pic.twitter.com/75402YIoGi
— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) March 9, 2023
It is not just the damage being done to the planet that is caused by global warming. There is a belief from some scientists that the likes of turbulence on aircraft is being increased by Climate Change, with a study by Reading University finding that turbulence increased by 55% between 1979 and 2020. The major issue isn’t even so much that the world is heating up as much as it is that a lot of people don’t care.
The idea of people able to use Artificial Intelligence to make our working lives easier, for example, is much more at the forefront of what people care about than what will happen to the planet in 100 years time. Not even AI can square that circle.
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