How Much Energy Does AI Use? The People Who Know Aren’t Saying
How Much Energy Does AI Use? The People Who Know Aren’t Saying
www.wired.com
How Much Energy Does AI Use? The People Who Know Aren’t Saying
Archived copies of the article:
35 comments
-
Too damn much for the value it creates.
-
AI slop poisoning is value too. The more everything is poisoned by it, the less useful things trained on new data are. The poison spreads in many ways, it's not something that can be removed.
It's important for prevention of totalitarianism driven by such technologies in the future.
So I honestly hope it kills the bullshit web and we'll be back to small communities based on personal ties, where the person making the rules is the webmaster you know, not an anonymous moderator or a bot. That's killing two birds with one stone, no downsides whatsoever.
-
-
The oil industry must be so giddy to have found a new scape goat out of nowhere.
Datacenters take a lot of energy because they serve a lot of people. The impact can be lessened with a proper grid centered around renewable.
There are actual things that are fucking up the planet, individuals using AI, gaming or having a Google account aren't the actual issue.
-
Data center demand has created huge backlog of gas turbine orders. They're not planning on renewables for the next big expansion
-
You are correct that renewable energy would help but if huge amounts of power are specifically being drawn for AI data centers that is part of the equation. Just like it's reduce/reuse/recycle in that order for handling items, it should be reduce/renewable for power, and we should have to build the renewable infrastructure before building more data centers.
-
-
An unholy amount.
An amount guaranteed to spike climate targets a decade early.
Stoopid much.
-
at least 3
-
This maths
-
-
A problem is that the information is not in the hands of the company selling the AI. The actual hardware is often owned by service providers and independent data centers.
-
They know exactly what the power consumption of that hardware is though. This isnt tough to figure out just because you use a cloud provider
-
Well, I work at an AI hyperscaler. I can tell you how much my facility uses, and how much each rack uses, but don't have any way to determine what the customer is doing on that server. Or even which servers a given customer is using. Is it being used heavily for queries? How many? Of what kind? We don't know. Only what the rack/row/pod/hall is consuming.
Also, does the network gear overhead count? How do you apportion that?
We have no visibility into the customer workload. Some of our customers use our systems for scientific research. Drugs, etc. How do you tally that?
I'm not saying that it is impossible, just that if the customer won't pay for that report, we're not going to spend money to build the systems to produce it.
Do I agree? No. But I'm just a grunt.
-
-
-
Which means it uses a crazy amount.
-
When Microsoft is buying nuclear power plants, what could go wrong!?
-
-
So much that now they want to turn nuclear reactors back on. Not because it’s green energy but because it’s free energy for them
-
It's not free, but it's the good part nonetheless - nuclear energy and thus increase in people trained to operate and build nuclear reactors.
Nuclear energy is, planning-wise, very high quality, you have a lot of control in scaling the output.
That allows, together with lots of accumulators of various kinds (pumping water up and such), to actually make renewables with uncontrollable output useful.
Making the average cost of energy better than just that of nuclear.
So, when Microsoft dies, those reactors and people will be of value.
-
35 comments