When Google announced this week that its climate emissions had increased by 48 percent since 2019, it pointed the finger at artificial intelligence.
US tech companies are building massive networks of data centers around the world and say artificial intelligence is fueling growth, shining a spotlight on how much energy the technology absorbs and its impact on the environment.
How does artificial intelligence use electricity?
Every time a user enters a request into a chatbot or AI builder, the request is sent to a data center.
Even before this stage, the development of artificial intelligence programs known as large language models (LLM) requires a huge amount of computer power.
All the while, computers are burning through electricity and servers are getting hotter, meaning more electricity to cool them.
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The International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a report earlier this year that data centers generally used about 40% of electricity for computing and 40% for cooling.
Why are experts worried?
Big tech companies have been rushing to pack all their products with AI since OpenAI released its ChatGPT bot in late 2022.
Many experts are concerned that these new products will cause an increase in electricity use.
This is primarily because AI services require more power than their non-AI counterparts.
For example, various studies have shown that each request made to ChatGPT uses about 10 times the power of a Google search.
So if Google switched all of its search queries to artificial intelligence — about nine billion a year — it could greatly inflate the company’s electricity use.
And most of these new services and products are LLM-based.
Programming these algorithms is extremely intensive and usually requires high-powered computer chips.
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In turn they require more cooling, which consumes more electricity.
How much energy does artificial intelligence use?
Before the age of artificial intelligence, estimates generally suggested that data centers accounted for about one percent of global electricity demand.
The IEA report stated that data centers, cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence together used 460 TWh of electricity worldwide in 2022, nearly 2% of total global electricity demand.
The IEA estimated that number could double by 2026 — the equivalent of Japan’s usage figures.
Alex De Vries, a researcher who runs the website Digiconomist, modeled the electricity used by AI alone, focusing on sales forecasts from the US company NVIDIA, which has cornered the market in servers specializing in artificial intelligence.
He concluded in a paper late last year that if NVIDIA’s projected sales for 2023 were correct and all these servers were operating at full capacity, they alone could be responsible for between 85.4-134.0 TWh of annual consumption of electricity — an amount similar to Argentina or Sweden.
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“The numbers I put in this article were already conservative to begin with because I couldn’t include things like cooling requirements,” he told AFP.
He added that NVIDIA’s server adoption had exceeded last year’s projections, so the figures would certainly be higher.
How do data centers cope?
Fabrice Coquio of Digital Realty, a data center company that leases its services to others, told AFP during a visit to one of its massive facilities north of Paris in April that artificial intelligence was set to transform his industry.
“It will be exactly the same (as the cloud), maybe a little more massive in terms of deployment,” he said.
Part of Digital Realty’s newest data center in Courneuve — a gigantic structure that looks like a soccer field — will be dedicated to artificial intelligence.
Coquio explained that normal computer requests could be handled by rack servers in heavily air-conditioned rooms.
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However, AI racks use much more powerful components, get very hot and require physical pumping of water to the equipment, he said.
“Certainly, this requires different servers, storage equipment, communication equipment,” Coquio said.
Is it sustainable?
The biggest players in artificial intelligence and data centers — Amazon, Google and Microsoft — are trying to reduce their carbon footprints by buying huge amounts of renewable energy.
Amazon official Prasad Kalyanaraman told AFP that the company’s data center division, AWS, was “the largest buyer of renewable energy in the world today.”
AWS is committed to being a net zero carbon company by 2040. Google and Microsoft are committed to achieving this goal by 2030.
However, building new data centers and increasing usage in existing ones is not going to help with green energy goals.
Google and Microsoft said in recent reports that greenhouse gas emissions have been increasing in recent years.
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Google is up 48% from 2019 and Microsoft up 30% from 2020.
Both have vehemently blamed AI.
Microsoft Chairman Brad Smith told Bloomberg in May that the commitment was a “moonshot” that came before the artificial intelligence “explosion,” adding that “the Moon is five times bigger than it was in 2020.” .
Source: AFP