Data Centres Will Use Twice as Much Energy By 2030 (nature.com) 53
The electricity consumption of data centres is projected to more than double by 2030, according to a report from the International Energy Agency published today. The primary culprit? AI. Nature: The report covers the current energy footprint for data centres and forecasts their future needs, which could help governments, companies, and local communities to plan infrastructure and AI deployment. IEA's models project that data centres will use 945 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2030, roughly equivalent to the current annual electricity consumption of Japan. By comparison, data centres consumed 415 TWh in 2024, roughly 1.5% of the world's total electricity consumption.
The projections largely focus on data centres, which also run computing tasks other than AI. Although the agency estimated the proportion of servers in data centres devoted to AI. They found that servers for AI accounted for 24% of server electricity demand and 15% of total data centre energy demand in 2024.
The projections largely focus on data centres, which also run computing tasks other than AI. Although the agency estimated the proportion of servers in data centres devoted to AI. They found that servers for AI accounted for 24% of server electricity demand and 15% of total data centre energy demand in 2024.
Better keep building more power plants (Score:2)
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Too late. You can't bring a nuclear power plant online in 5 years in the US. Even if you got everything approved today.
Default position if we do nothing is the free market decides who get electricity and who does not. And as a residential customer you will have one hand tied behind your back because you won't get the same commercial rate that Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc pay.
Re:Better keep building more power plants (Score:4, Insightful)
How about just using a lot less AI? I think whatever improvements, if any, that AI has made to mankind's lot are vastly overshadowed by their environmental damage, greenhouse gas emissions, and job market disruption.
When you factor in the degree to which AI has already become a devastatingly effective propaganda tool, AI just seems like a really, really bad idea. "We did it because it looked cool and because we could" seems is a really shitty justification.
Re:Better keep building more power plants (Score:4, Insightful)
How about just using a lot less AI? I think whatever improvements, if any, that AI has made to mankind's lot are vastly overshadowed by their environmental damage, greenhouse gas emissions, and job market disruption.
When you factor in the degree to which AI has already become a devastatingly effective propaganda tool, AI just seems like a really, really bad idea. "We did it because it looked cool and because we could" seems is a really shitty justification.
AI at a reasonable pace could be a net positive. Well reasoned research into the possibilities leading to incremental improvements. But somebody figured out a way to hype it into a profit center, and once that happened, it became an arms race. Now, any attempt at getting introspection from the AI prophets is met with shaky-voiced outrage, "But, if we don't, they will," and completely unreasonable expectations that the only "solution" to today's AI's issues is to throw more power, more hardware, and more overall resources at the problem.
AI + Greed is the lead-in to the equation that could create a biosphere rattling end to humanity. Granted, greed is the driver of most of the huge changes we're creating that seem to be the existential boogeymen hovering on the horizon.
Re:Better keep building more power plants (Score:4, Interesting)
I can imagine someone making remarks similar to yours when the printing press was invented. Your falling sky is someone else's brand new world of tomorrow. Humanity will survive LLMs and image generators. If this is what finishes off our ancestors wasted their time surviving plagues, starvation, and other non first-world problems.
Re:Better keep building more power plants (Score:4, Interesting)
I can imagine someone making remarks similar to yours when the printing press was invented.
I thought about that as I was writing my comment, although the printing press wasn't what came to mind.
AI seems qualitatively different from the printing revolution. Outside of the scribes who had to find other work, it seems that the press kicked off an employment boom. And the negative effects of AI on the natural environment are probably orders of magnitude greater than those of printing.
Because we're human, any significant technological development we make can and will be used to disadvantage others of our kind. But I think the abuses which AI has visited on us already - to say nothing of what's coming in the next few decades - will dwarf those of prior tech innovations.
Re: Better keep building more power plants (Score:2)
ChatGPT:
Thatâ(TM)s a strong claim, but itâ(TM)s worth scrutinizing a bit. Printing certainly had a significant environmental impactâ"mass deforestation, chemical pollution from inks and paper processing, and a centuries-long legacy of physical waste. It was also more decentralized and less energy-efficient per page than todayâ(TM)s digital systems.
AI, especially large language models, *does* require substantial energy for training and deploymentâ"but once deployed, the energy cost p
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Thanks for this. It stings that I missed all of those points I should have thought of, but it's good to see a more optimistic take on the situation.
I also missed something that ChatGPT didn't mention, namely that print historically has been a huge propaganda vector. Not one of my finer moments...
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AI is too positive about itself. Yes it will have benefits over a paper version of a newspaper. But I don't think that digital presentation and the energy consumption are correct when we take into account time. I have books that are over 40 years old, some even more than 70. Now I can access those books and take in the knowledge without any extra energy use (if I take it in daylight for me or someone else to read one of those books. More or less at any moment of any day.
Keeping a digital version of such a b
Re: Better keep building more power plants (Score:2)
How much energy is required to keep the book in environmental conditions favorable to preservation in mint condition? How much energy is spent electronically unrolling old scrolls to retrieve the symbolic language within?
Re: Better keep building more power plants (Score:1)
Plus, AI has potential *positive* environmental impacts too: optimizing energy grids, improving climate modeling, enabling precision agriculture, and streamlining supply chains.
If it were a human writing that answer, I would consider it either uninformed or bad faith. AI means a lot of different things and they are mixed up in that answer. There is the current trend of generative AI that needs lots of data and energy, and doesn't do any of the things cited above. Then there's research in combinatorial optimisation, climate modelling and a few other things which do these things. Even though they do also rely on data availability and computation, the scales are not even close. These
Re: Better keep building more power plants (Score:2)
Re: Better keep building more power plants (Score:4, Informative)
A third option would be to make AI a lot more energy-efficient. I know it's doable, as I've got a fairly powerful demonstration model installed in my skull that runs on less power than a light bulb.
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Yeah, or we can stop using precious resources on AI because "AI"
Any more, all the use of AI just makes everything into an energy-intensive clusterfuck. Yeah, let me use AI to find jobs I'm qualified for, then AI to write my resume for me, and AI to write a cover letter for me, so that I can submit it to an HR department using AI to weed through all the AI bullshit. Then, if my AI defeats your AI, I might get an interview that I'll likely TANK because I don't have the language skills to do those things on
Obligatory XKCD (Score:5, Insightful)
Obligatory XKCD: Extrapolating [xkcd.com]
This kind of sounds like a report designed to push companies into building more power plants to drive supply up and prices down.
Data centers are likely to do everything they can to keep power consumption down, because power costs money. Doubling the power needs, even if supply keeps up, means doubling the cost, and I'm not sure that's really sustainable in terms of revenue.
That said, scarcity breeds innovation. Limitations to power availability are what drive companies to find ways to be more energy-efficient. For on-device models, obviously the power availability isn't going to improve significantly, and CPUs aren't going to get massively more efficient per watt, so you're going to have those constraints no matter what, but for data-center-side AI work, you need the threat of running out of power availability, because that's what forces the folks working on the models to find ways to prune them to be faster and more efficient, whereas in a hypothetical world with infinite free power and CPU, future power consumption would be unbounded.
Mind you, hardware costs also help bound things and serve as a forcing function to make things more efficient, but those are one-time capital costs, whereas power costs are ongoing expenses, so when viewed from a long-term financial planning perspective, hardware costs are noise, and power costs are a much stronger forcing function.
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There could be an opportunity here. If they are required to use net zero energy then we will get a lot of renewables and storage installed, which will benefit the grid as a whole and push energy prices down for everyone. They will have to install enough capacity to cover them all year round, meaning that most of the time there will be a large excess of cheap power.
Data centers will pollute twice as much by 2030 (Score:1)
It's pretty clear that there is no intention to be limited in any way by what kind of energy they are going to use and that means the energy use is going to be relying on polluting sources. Corporations don't care about who they harm and people don't seem to give a damn either... until it's them. This world is fucked.
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It's pretty clear that there is no intention to be limited in any way by what kind of energy they are going to use and that means the energy use is going to be relying on polluting sources. Corporations don't care about who they harm and people don't seem to give a damn either... until it's them. This world is fucked.
Polluting twice as much is probably best-case. Realistically, building new power plants takes longer than starting up plants that already exist but are offline, and most of the plants that are offline because of cost reasons are likely to be based on fossil fuels. So it could very well be that using 2x the power results in 200,000x as much pollution if most of their existing power comes from solar and wind and most of the extra power comes from bringing coal and natural gas plants back online.
And with 145
Re: Data centers will pollute twice as much by 203 (Score:2)
If you look at a BPA generation graph (https://transmission.bpa.gov/Business/Operations/Wind/baltwg.aspx), do you too see the supply well exceeding the load, and easily able to absorb a doubling of dats center usage without adding any pollution?
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If you look at a BPA generation graph (https://transmission.bpa.gov/Business/Operations/Wind/baltwg.aspx), do you too see the supply well exceeding the load, and easily able to absorb a doubling of dats center usage without adding any pollution?
Yay. A power wholesaler in Oregon has a surplus of wind power. We're saved. /s
For every excess kWh of power that they produce, somebody else is consuming it. How do I know someone is consuming it? Because they aren't in a 24x7 state of continuous curtailment where they are shutting down solar panels and stopping wind generators so that they don't run too fast, go over frequency, and potentially cause damage to the turbines of various larger power plants in the process.
To be fair, at the national level,
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It's pretty clear that there is no intention to be limited in any way by what kind of energy they are going to use and that means the energy use is going to be relying on polluting sources.
I dunno, someone recently mentioned "beautiful, clean coal", but can't remember who. /s :-)
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There is one solution: put the AI data centers at locations where cleanly-generated power is plentiful. And that only means two countries, Iceland and Norway, where you can tap into the huge amount of geothermal energy available on Iceland or the huge excess of hydroelectric power from Norway's many dams.
At least that's the solution in the short to medium term. Long term, it's time to starting building cleaner and safer Generation IV nuclear reactors in modular form with each small reactor generating about
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There is one solution:
It doesn't matter if you solve the problem or not. If it costs more than simply polluting then they don't care. You have to remember that these people are in the vein as the tobacco execs who donated 1 million dollars to cancer research foundation and then spend 7 million dollars advertising that fact.
Re: Data centers will pollute twice as much by 203 (Score:2)
Why ignore Washington state's excess hydropower supply?
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Well, there's been a clamoring by environmentalists to remove several dams along the Columbia and Snake Rivers to increase the salmon population. Mind you, there are many opposing such an idea, including many farmers in eastern Washington and Oregon dependent on the water stored from these dams for irrigation water, let alone removing the power generation capacity from these dams needed for the type of large server farms you mentioned.
To replace you. (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't know if you believe it or not but the CEOs absolutely believe that they're going to be replacing a large percentage of their employees. And you know what they're right.
All this talk about AI whether it's real or not has got CEOs going top to bottom through their entire organization looking for things they can automate. Looking for places th
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Can we replace the CEOs with AI then?
>This will free up people for creative and/or leisure pursuits.
Creative positions are being replaced with AI. How do you propose we all support ourselves? By making bad pottery?
>As the costs of goods and services plummets due to massive efficiency gains, cost of living should become so low as to be negligible for most people.
The Star Trek fantasy. There is nothing pointing to "massive efficiency gains". Industrialization hasn't resulted in a "cost of living sho
Re: To replace you. (Score:2)
Is a Strong Basic Income looking better yet?
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Coverage
* Company that made an AI its chief executive sees stocks climb -- China-based NetDragon Websoft says it is the first company in the world to appoint an AI as its CEO March 16 2023 https://www.independent.co.uk/... [independent.co.uk]
* How Should CEO’s Embrace AI Or Will AI Assume CEO Roles? May 26 2023 https://www.forbes.com/sites/c... [forbes.com]
* Can AI Become Your Next CEO? Jan 11 2024 https://www.forbes.com/sites/s... [forbes.com]
* AI Can (Mostly) Outperform Human CEOs Sept 26 2024 https://hbr.org/2024/09/ai-can... [hbr.org]
* The Dawn Of The
You don't replace your ruling class (Score:2)
What's amazing is the number of people who do not understand that CEOs and billionaire investors are just kings and dukes and duchesses and queens. The royalty figured out a while ago that they can't be too obvious about it or people start trying to kill them so they put a few steps between them and the divine right of kings.
What if the actual culprit is advertising? (Score:2, Offtopic)
Why do you think slashdot won't let me refresh this site until the ever-more-intrusive ad space from the last time I viewed the site has fully re-loaded? How many compute cycles are wasted on trying to force me to watch ads, 99.999% of which don't interest me?
Adblockers are your friends. (Score:2)
Slashdot is obviously rolling in phat stacks or it couldn't afford to remain irrelevant, so it doesn't need any revenue my presences generates.
Or an AI bubble poppage (Score:1)
...already signs of cut-backs. [slashdot.org]
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Millions of people that lived in Los Angeles in the 60s-90s can tell you that you're full of shit. Burning shit is not clean.
Houston's learning that lesson the hard way right now. It is now the smoggiest city in the USA.
Several hundred million Chinese can also tell you that you're full of shit regarding the clean claims.
Every coal miner that died of black lung, too.
Oh speaking of coal, it releases more radioactive shit per year than every single nuclear incident combined ever has.
Don't forget the mercury.
Cl
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China builds coal power plants to produce more solar, wind and hydro power. They want that ASAP, so they build coal plants that only last for short time for that purpose.
Because once solar/wind/hydro power is in operation, those coal plants will seize operation right after. As a nation that always had issues getting energy to their shores and inlands, they learned that energy independency is worth a lot more than you think. Besides, China has not that much need for anything else.
The USA is practically the e
Human powered (Score:1)
Conservation (Score:2)
So all of those years of energy conservation and alternate energy, etc, etc end up being pissed away on data centers and bitcoin mining.
Re: Conservation (Score:2)
From eia.gov's "Energy facts explained":
"U.S. energy production has been greater than U.S. energy consumption in recent years:
U.S. total annual energy production has exceeded total annual energy consumption since 2019. In 2023, production was about 102.83 quads and consumption was 93.59 quads."
Why adopt a scarcity mindset when energy supply exceeds demand?
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Because the manner in which we create that energy is horking up our planet's climate.
I mean, I could heat my home when the power goes out by running my car in the garage and opening a door to the inside of the house.
But not for long.
Makes me think of Professor Frink (Score:3)
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"I don't want to live on this planet anymore."
I suspect they won't (Score:3)
The largest contributor to gobbling up AI resources is training LLMs. Most smaller (and far more useful) AI tools are trained on smaller specific purpose datasets and don't chew through millions of GPU hours at an insane cost.
With multiple LLMs on the market and no sign that they are getting any better, I suspect the bottom will drop out of the AI industry, at least in the race to dominate this stupid general purpose AI market as people realise just how damn useless they actually are.
So, by 2030 (Score:2)
The rest of us in the US will start seeing rolling blackouts.