6 ms·

Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources

191 points by alwillis 2y ago

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
"Agi will solve everything"
bravura 2y ago
I mean, cool? Really? Remind me how much carbon is emitted by workers being forced to commute to serve coffee to social media managers who are selling fast fashion to influencers?
- zamalek 2y ago
  At least they are causally linked to the workplace. Gigatons more CO2 from workers commuting to serve ego to their managers.
- muglug 2y ago
  1. This is whataboutism 2. According to the EPA's greenhouse gas calculator, this year's increase is equivalent to an extra 800,000 gas-powered cars on the road.
  - bravura 2y ago
    No, it's not really whataboutism at all. Whataboutism is when two entities are doing shitty stuff with roughly commensurate negative impact. Versus dinging an endeavor that might have net positive impact (AI might REDUCE environmental impact) against forces that 100x larger and have no positive direction, it's actually just: pointing out when journalism uses a relative value to make a tempest in a teapot and distract from the big picture. We can't just zoom in on 1% stuff that's working for the common good (at least in principle, if not, let's make THAT issue the article) as a scare story, and not talk about how it's a fraction of what is really up.
    - seadan83 2y ago
      Replace "remind me" with "what about" and the sentence reads perfectly. That is usually a good test for what about'ism > Whataboutism is when two entities are doing shitty stuff with roughly commensurate negative impact I have different view. What about'ism can be akin: "oh, you don't like that i drive a ar, what about the millions of cars driven everyday? And what about al gore! I will not stop driving until he stops flying" Perhaps my understanding is wrong of what-aboutism, wanted to point out that there not be common ground on the definitions of terms. FWIW, while AI might reduce carbon impact, as you have stated, so far it has not. Data centers use a lot of electricity, they are significant, and have a lot of projected growth ahead. With that said and news the impact has ramped up, so far we have only increased the challenge.
energybored11 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
neilv 2y ago
But it's for the noble cause of automated plagiarism of Web sites and open source code.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  Just say you don't understand how LLMs work, you don't need to beat around the bush. Maybe someone will help you understand.
  - smrq 2y ago
    Ah, because given said understanding, surely it's impossible to hold a different opinion than yours.
    - bongodongobob 2y ago
      It's not an opinion. Plagiarism has a meaning and LLMs are not doing that.
      - Taurenking 2y ago
        [dead]
      - throwaway290 2y ago
        LLMs are not doing that, their operators do
- mvkel 2y ago
  When you read a website do I get to say you're plagiarizing it?
  - card_zero 2y ago
    No, plagiarism is presenting text as one's own.
madboston 2y ago
I'm sure the C-suites will use the AI to come up with reasons why this is OK..
- astrange 2y ago
  The C-suite has already given interviews about how it's a bad thing they're working on. (Specifically the "President of Microsoft", which is a super fake sounding title.)
bastard_op 2y ago
They'll just buy some more fake carbon credits, tell everyone it'll be alright and the planet won't overheat now. Nothing to see here, move along.
- nozzlegear 2y ago
  Does Microsoft have a history of buying fake carbon credits? And by that I mean, do they buy carbon credits from disreputable sources more often than reputable ones on average in recent years? Or do you simply believe that all carbon credit systems are fake?
  - faeriechangling 2y ago
    I'm pretty firmly in the latter camp. Carbon credits essentially measure how much co2 emissions were prevented by the carbon credits existing. Not only is that pretty much impossible to measure, every company offering carbon credits at market rates is using a form of measurement which is BS. Carbon credit schemes may do SOMETHING to offset climate change but less than they advertise.
    - kevindamm 2y ago
      What about the carbon credits for building out renewable energy systems locally/domestically? Those exist.
      - al_borland 2y ago
        Those systems should get built out because they make sense to build out. Having a company feeling justified in releasing tons of extra co2 in the process seems like it nullifies some of the good the plant would bring.
        kevindamm 2y ago
        Suppose many of those projects would not be built out without channeling significant capital to it, and carbon credits being an effective means of securing that capital. Would that change the calculus for you? Note that I recognize many (possibly most?) carbon credits programs are bogus or worse, but trying to draw attention to circumstances where it's not always so cut and dry.
Reptur 2y ago
It seems the article forgot to mention that Microsoft is actively pursuing nuclear energy in response, which is a significant omission.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- listless 2y ago
  Would be interesting if one of the major benefits of AI is it pushing us to clean energy
  - ffhhj 2y ago
    Clean energy until waste is hidden under the carpet for thousands of years.
    - astrange 2y ago
      Even regular landfills are very much not a problem. Nuclear waste is much less of a problem than that.
    - N0b8ez 2y ago
      Is inside an abandoned salt mine really the same as "under the carpet"? I don't see what scenario people have in mind when they're worried about nuclear waste storage.
    - Mawr 2y ago
      Sure, we may be heading right into a massive climate crisis in the next few decades, but what about the hypothetical post-humans who will dig up spent nuclear fuel 10_000 years from now?!
      - Andrex 2y ago
        Transportation and storage are still issues we have to deal with today, though. There was definitely a window, maybe fifty years ago, where widespread adoption of nuclear energy would have stopped and reversed climate change. We may have had an increase in Chernobyls with the proliferation of non-modern reactor designs, but in this hypothetical reality maybe people would have been OK with that. The problem today is that renewables are getting too cheap and too good, and the storage problem shrinks every day. Meanwhile, it takes upwards of a decade to license and build a single reactor. France's fancy new reactors won't be online until 2040. Nuclear is just too slow. I feel like 10 years from now it won't even be a debate or a contest, nuclear will just be the most expensive option by a country mile. Greenhouse gases will peak within the next 2 years[0]. The nuclear lobby missed their chance, which does mean we'll have to deal with some effects of climate change we could have avoided. My feeling right now (and I kinda flip-flop every few years) is that nuclear lost and it's economically infeasible to try again. Change my mind? 0. https://climateanalytics.org/publications/when-will-global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-peak https://climateanalytics.org/publications/when-will-global-g...
Barrin92 2y ago
A good moment to bring up Jevon's Paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox) "In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced. Governments typically assume that efficiency gains will lower resource consumption, ignoring the possibility of the paradox arising" As there's a huge crowd who seems very convinced of the idea that the solution to handle our resource problems is to be found in various growth and tech oriented solutions.
- ip26 2y ago
  The positive side is supercomputers help us analyze the climate, the Atlantic current, and so forth. The negative side is they also help locate oil. Is it a win or loss on net? Hard to know. Thinking of entertainment, it probably IS a climate win if you spend an hour at home watching Netflix or chatting with GPT, as opposed to driving around town or jetting across the world. Supposedly a GPT-4 query costs 0.01kWh - meanwhile, a Tesla consumes 0.35kWh a minute at freeway speed.
  - defrost 2y ago
    > it probably IS a climate win if you spend an hour at home watching Netflix or chatting with GPT, as opposed to driving around town or jetting across the world. Nope. Look back to the GP's paradox and the energy consumed watching even just the single most popular youtube video . . . That isn't "energy saved" from "otherwise people would be flocking miles in cars to watch Despacito and Baby Shark Dance in theatres. The AI training loads are over and above the already existing supercomputer modelling of land|sea|air fluid flows vie regular means - it's questionable whether LLM's et al even add anything of values in that domain (despite a plethora of papers asserting it to be so).
  - Syonyk 2y ago
    I would be very interested in the breakdown of how they conclude it's 0.01kWh (10Wh) per request, and what that does and doesn't include. I expect that if you were to calculate "incremental energy per request" - how much "extra CPU compute" each request adds, you could probably get to that sort of value. But odds are good that figure ignored all the training data collection, all the processing on that, storage of that digested information, retrieval of it, etc, and that sort of number tends to also skip things like "storage systems running to have the information available." If I've got an entire datacenter running to provide services, and the request consumes, say, 3 GPU-minutes of time across all the nodes, sure. This is a sane value. It just ignores a lot of the other resources dedicated to the task at various points. Microsoft isn't using 30% more energy than their current footprint on 10Wh/request AI answers. Math like this is very much a "Tell me what answer you'd like, and I'll make it work out!" sort of scenario. An increase in data center use by 30% is harder to fudge.
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
Microsoft has talked about being carbon negative by 2030, and removing all emissions they've done over the lifetime of the company by 2050. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-be-carbon-negative-by-2030/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-b... Sounds good. Reciprocally though, my skepticism in various green credit programs has only grown over time. It seems unclear how many efforts out there are green washing credits, to not yet mine or make some display that doesn't help greatly. But I do think if there's any hope for green economy, a $3T company probably has swagger & personel to eventually refine & drive towards effective spending. Hopefully. If they can be true to these declarations. Let us hope.
- coliveira 2y ago
  It's very easy to be "carbon neutral" when all you do is to write software. I doubt they would be this public if they were in a heavy industrial field, for example. Now that they're in the datacenter business things will be different.
delish 2y ago
It is praiseworthy Microsoft straightforwardly reported the increase. I haven't paid attention to these kinds of optional disclosures. Never thought about it but were I asked I would have said these are advertisements. I don't dislike sustainability, but I thought those function as advertisements because you can expect to get more sustainability "for free" over time, because of many things (Moore's Law, ephemeralization, societal investment). So of course savvy corporations publish sustainability reports that say, "We're doin' great : )." Therefore I'd argue their commitment to sustainability is shown by their disclosure of the increase.
- asabjorn 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - faeriechangling 2y ago
    Can you think of any ulterior motives behind the oligarch's actions? Such as how global warming is causing increasing insurance rates worldwide as both severe and more mundane weather events cause more and more property damage to their extensive property portfolios?
    - asabjorn 2y ago
      Let’a assume the hypothesis that they believe that to be true. Why would anyone that believe that shut off nuclear plants that emit zero CO2 in Germany and burn wood as well as gas instead?
      - faeriechangling 2y ago
        I suppose that might be more related to left wing populism as embodied by the German Greens who worked for decades to get nuclear energy out of Germany. Also because the plants would have had to be decommissioned anyways and modern nuclear is not SO competitive for practical concerns to outweigh political expediency. I truly don't think it was a result of the actions of a centralised oligarch elite that drove this anyways.
grandma_tea 2y ago
I tried to find the source of the 29% figure, but it's defined as data center usage. I understand machine learning is resource intensive but how much is it really? Are the numbers for this available to the public?
- llm_trw 2y ago
  It's matrix multiplication being done as fast as possible. On local machines the best proxy for useful gpu load for training is power draw.
  - grandma_tea 2y ago
    Perhaps my question was worded poorly. I'm saying is: the premise of the article is wrong. It attributes the 29% figure to AI but the source attributes the 29% to new datacenters. It seems unlikely to me that 100% of new datacenter usage would go to AI.
vegetablepotpie 2y ago
The energy consumption would not be a problem if it was renewable energy. Ironically, we already have plenty of renewable energy in the US, it’s just there, sitting, waiting to be hooked up to the grid and not being used productively. The US currently has 947 GW of renewable generation capacity that is not hooked up to the grid [1]. To put that number into perspective, the US currently has 1160 GW of generation capacity in total [2]. We could almost double our countries generation capacity if we could just hook up the power to the grid. Unfortunately it takes 10 years to build new transmission lines in the US [3]. Changes are going to need to be made to the permitting process, which may include giving more responsibility and agency to FERC to oversee the review process. Congress needs to act on this. If you care about this, you can educate your self and get involved. https://community.citizensclimate.org/topics/clean-energy-permitting-reform https://community.citizensclimate.org/topics/clean-energy-pe... [1] https://emp.lbl.gov/utility-scale-solar https://emp.lbl.gov/utility-scale-solar [2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us-generation-capacity-and-sales.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-... [3] https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/10/permitting-americas-next-big-climate-conundrum/ https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/10/permitting-americ...
- sircastor 2y ago
  So to be clear, this is just a bureaucracy issue?
  - sanxiyn 2y ago
    Yes.
- fpgaminer 2y ago
  > At the end of 2022, there were at least 947 GW of utility-scale solar power capacity within the interconnection queues across the nation, 456 GW of which include batteries. Seems more likely to me that the utilities are expecting a large growth in consumption in the coming years and built out capacity ahead of time. Seems reasonable.
- jonas21 2y ago
xyzzy4747 2y ago
We must first destroy the environment in order to save it.
MrVandemar 2y ago
To those who are drinking deep of the AI kool-aid, know this: this is not remotely sustainable. Anyone who is thinking AI will replace writers and artists and voice-overs and who knows who else ... it's going to cost more money than you think, and it's all getting added to the considerable bill we're running up that will end up costing us everything.
- 123yawaworht456 2y ago
  learn to code
  - MrVandemar 2y ago
    Bit of a non-sequitur. But, yes, I do know how to code FWIW.
- jahewson 2y ago
  Allow me to introduce you to Moore’s law…
  - MrVandemar 2y ago
    What about it?
mmoskal 2y ago
One sentence from The Economist seems to explain more than TFA: "Microsoft reported a 31% increase in its indirect (Scope 3) emissions last year from building more data centres (including the carbon found in construction materials) as well as from semiconductors, servers and racks." So no, it's not about lack of renewable electricity. https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/2024/05/16/business https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/2024/05/16/bus...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
latchkey 2y ago
Their Quincy dc has been "under fire" for years now for various issues... 2012: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/09/25/microsoft-quincy-energy-practices-under-fire https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/09/25/micr... 2018: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-wants-to-deploy-72-gensets-in-quincy-wa/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-wants-t... 2020: I wonder if anyone will hold them to this in 2030... https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/energy/article/11428860/microsoft-plans-to-stop-using-diesel-generators-by-2030 https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/energy/article/11428860/m...

191 points by alwillis 2y ago

"Agi will solve everything"

I mean, cool? Really? Remind me how much carbon is emitted by workers being forced to commute to serve coffee to social media managers who are selling fast fashion to influencers?

zamalek 2y ago
At least they are causally linked to the workplace. Gigatons more CO2 from workers commuting to serve ego to their managers.
muglug 2y ago
1. This is whataboutism 2. According to the EPA's greenhouse gas calculator, this year's increase is equivalent to an extra 800,000 gas-powered cars on the road.
- bravura 2y ago
  No, it's not really whataboutism at all. Whataboutism is when two entities are doing shitty stuff with roughly commensurate negative impact. Versus dinging an endeavor that might have net positive impact (AI might REDUCE environmental impact) against forces that 100x larger and have no positive direction, it's actually just: pointing out when journalism uses a relative value to make a tempest in a teapot and distract from the big picture. We can't just zoom in on 1% stuff that's working for the common good (at least in principle, if not, let's make THAT issue the article) as a scare story, and not talk about how it's a fraction of what is really up.
  - seadan83 2y ago
    Replace "remind me" with "what about" and the sentence reads perfectly. That is usually a good test for what about'ism > Whataboutism is when two entities are doing shitty stuff with roughly commensurate negative impact I have different view. What about'ism can be akin: "oh, you don't like that i drive a ar, what about the millions of cars driven everyday? And what about al gore! I will not stop driving until he stops flying" Perhaps my understanding is wrong of what-aboutism, wanted to point out that there not be common ground on the definitions of terms. FWIW, while AI might reduce carbon impact, as you have stated, so far it has not. Data centers use a lot of electricity, they are significant, and have a lot of projected growth ahead. With that said and news the impact has ramped up, so far we have only increased the challenge.

energybored11 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

neilv 2y ago

But it's for the noble cause of automated plagiarism of Web sites and open source code.

bongodongobob 2y ago
Just say you don't understand how LLMs work, you don't need to beat around the bush. Maybe someone will help you understand.
- smrq 2y ago
  Ah, because given said understanding, surely it's impossible to hold a different opinion than yours.
  - bongodongobob 2y ago
    It's not an opinion. Plagiarism has a meaning and LLMs are not doing that.
    - Taurenking 2y ago
      [dead]
    - throwaway290 2y ago
      LLMs are not doing that, their operators do
mvkel 2y ago
When you read a website do I get to say you're plagiarizing it?
- card_zero 2y ago
  No, plagiarism is presenting text as one's own.

madboston 2y ago

I'm sure the C-suites will use the AI to come up with reasons why this is OK..

astrange 2y ago
The C-suite has already given interviews about how it's a bad thing they're working on. (Specifically the "President of Microsoft", which is a super fake sounding title.)

bastard_op 2y ago

They'll just buy some more fake carbon credits, tell everyone it'll be alright and the planet won't overheat now. Nothing to see here, move along.

nozzlegear 2y ago
Does Microsoft have a history of buying fake carbon credits? And by that I mean, do they buy carbon credits from disreputable sources more often than reputable ones on average in recent years? Or do you simply believe that all carbon credit systems are fake?
- faeriechangling 2y ago
  I'm pretty firmly in the latter camp. Carbon credits essentially measure how much co2 emissions were prevented by the carbon credits existing. Not only is that pretty much impossible to measure, every company offering carbon credits at market rates is using a form of measurement which is BS. Carbon credit schemes may do SOMETHING to offset climate change but less than they advertise.
  - kevindamm 2y ago
    What about the carbon credits for building out renewable energy systems locally/domestically? Those exist.
    - al_borland 2y ago
      Those systems should get built out because they make sense to build out. Having a company feeling justified in releasing tons of extra co2 in the process seems like it nullifies some of the good the plant would bring.
      - kevindamm 2y ago
        Suppose many of those projects would not be built out without channeling significant capital to it, and carbon credits being an effective means of securing that capital. Would that change the calculus for you? Note that I recognize many (possibly most?) carbon credits programs are bogus or worse, but trying to draw attention to circumstances where it's not always so cut and dry.

Reptur 2y ago

It seems the article forgot to mention that Microsoft is actively pursuing nuclear energy in response, which is a significant omission.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
listless 2y ago
Would be interesting if one of the major benefits of AI is it pushing us to clean energy
- ffhhj 2y ago
  Clean energy until waste is hidden under the carpet for thousands of years.
  - astrange 2y ago
    Even regular landfills are very much not a problem. Nuclear waste is much less of a problem than that.
  - N0b8ez 2y ago
    Is inside an abandoned salt mine really the same as "under the carpet"? I don't see what scenario people have in mind when they're worried about nuclear waste storage.
  - Mawr 2y ago
    Sure, we may be heading right into a massive climate crisis in the next few decades, but what about the hypothetical post-humans who will dig up spent nuclear fuel 10_000 years from now?!
    - Andrex 2y ago
      Transportation and storage are still issues we have to deal with today, though. There was definitely a window, maybe fifty years ago, where widespread adoption of nuclear energy would have stopped and reversed climate change. We may have had an increase in Chernobyls with the proliferation of non-modern reactor designs, but in this hypothetical reality maybe people would have been OK with that. The problem today is that renewables are getting too cheap and too good, and the storage problem shrinks every day. Meanwhile, it takes upwards of a decade to license and build a single reactor. France's fancy new reactors won't be online until 2040. Nuclear is just too slow. I feel like 10 years from now it won't even be a debate or a contest, nuclear will just be the most expensive option by a country mile. Greenhouse gases will peak within the next 2 years[0]. The nuclear lobby missed their chance, which does mean we'll have to deal with some effects of climate change we could have avoided. My feeling right now (and I kinda flip-flop every few years) is that nuclear lost and it's economically infeasible to try again. Change my mind? 0. https://climateanalytics.org/publications/when-will-global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-peak https://climateanalytics.org/publications/when-will-global-g...

Barrin92 2y ago

A good moment to bring up Jevon's Paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox) "In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced. Governments typically assume that efficiency gains will lower resource consumption, ignoring the possibility of the paradox arising" As there's a huge crowd who seems very convinced of the idea that the solution to handle our resource problems is to be found in various growth and tech oriented solutions.

ip26 2y ago
The positive side is supercomputers help us analyze the climate, the Atlantic current, and so forth. The negative side is they also help locate oil. Is it a win or loss on net? Hard to know. Thinking of entertainment, it probably IS a climate win if you spend an hour at home watching Netflix or chatting with GPT, as opposed to driving around town or jetting across the world. Supposedly a GPT-4 query costs 0.01kWh - meanwhile, a Tesla consumes 0.35kWh a minute at freeway speed.
- defrost 2y ago
  > it probably IS a climate win if you spend an hour at home watching Netflix or chatting with GPT, as opposed to driving around town or jetting across the world. Nope. Look back to the GP's paradox and the energy consumed watching even just the single most popular youtube video . . . That isn't "energy saved" from "otherwise people would be flocking miles in cars to watch Despacito and Baby Shark Dance in theatres. The AI training loads are over and above the already existing supercomputer modelling of land|sea|air fluid flows vie regular means - it's questionable whether LLM's et al even add anything of values in that domain (despite a plethora of papers asserting it to be so).
- Syonyk 2y ago
  I would be very interested in the breakdown of how they conclude it's 0.01kWh (10Wh) per request, and what that does and doesn't include. I expect that if you were to calculate "incremental energy per request" - how much "extra CPU compute" each request adds, you could probably get to that sort of value. But odds are good that figure ignored all the training data collection, all the processing on that, storage of that digested information, retrieval of it, etc, and that sort of number tends to also skip things like "storage systems running to have the information available." If I've got an entire datacenter running to provide services, and the request consumes, say, 3 GPU-minutes of time across all the nodes, sure. This is a sane value. It just ignores a lot of the other resources dedicated to the task at various points. Microsoft isn't using 30% more energy than their current footprint on 10Wh/request AI answers. Math like this is very much a "Tell me what answer you'd like, and I'll make it work out!" sort of scenario. An increase in data center use by 30% is harder to fudge.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

Microsoft has talked about being carbon negative by 2030, and removing all emissions they've done over the lifetime of the company by 2050. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-be-carbon-negative-by-2030/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-b... Sounds good. Reciprocally though, my skepticism in various green credit programs has only grown over time. It seems unclear how many efforts out there are green washing credits, to not yet mine or make some display that doesn't help greatly. But I do think if there's any hope for green economy, a $3T company probably has swagger & personel to eventually refine & drive towards effective spending. Hopefully. If they can be true to these declarations. Let us hope.

coliveira 2y ago
It's very easy to be "carbon neutral" when all you do is to write software. I doubt they would be this public if they were in a heavy industrial field, for example. Now that they're in the datacenter business things will be different.

delish 2y ago

It is praiseworthy Microsoft straightforwardly reported the increase. I haven't paid attention to these kinds of optional disclosures. Never thought about it but were I asked I would have said these are advertisements. I don't dislike sustainability, but I thought those function as advertisements because you can expect to get more sustainability "for free" over time, because of many things (Moore's Law, ephemeralization, societal investment). So of course savvy corporations publish sustainability reports that say, "We're doin' great : )." Therefore I'd argue their commitment to sustainability is shown by their disclosure of the increase.

asabjorn 2y ago
[flagged]
- faeriechangling 2y ago
  Can you think of any ulterior motives behind the oligarch's actions? Such as how global warming is causing increasing insurance rates worldwide as both severe and more mundane weather events cause more and more property damage to their extensive property portfolios?
  - asabjorn 2y ago
    Let’a assume the hypothesis that they believe that to be true. Why would anyone that believe that shut off nuclear plants that emit zero CO2 in Germany and burn wood as well as gas instead?
    - faeriechangling 2y ago
      I suppose that might be more related to left wing populism as embodied by the German Greens who worked for decades to get nuclear energy out of Germany. Also because the plants would have had to be decommissioned anyways and modern nuclear is not SO competitive for practical concerns to outweigh political expediency. I truly don't think it was a result of the actions of a centralised oligarch elite that drove this anyways.

grandma_tea 2y ago

I tried to find the source of the 29% figure, but it's defined as data center usage. I understand machine learning is resource intensive but how much is it really? Are the numbers for this available to the public?

llm_trw 2y ago
It's matrix multiplication being done as fast as possible. On local machines the best proxy for useful gpu load for training is power draw.
- grandma_tea 2y ago
  Perhaps my question was worded poorly. I'm saying is: the premise of the article is wrong. It attributes the 29% figure to AI but the source attributes the 29% to new datacenters. It seems unlikely to me that 100% of new datacenter usage would go to AI.

vegetablepotpie 2y ago

The energy consumption would not be a problem if it was renewable energy. Ironically, we already have plenty of renewable energy in the US, it’s just there, sitting, waiting to be hooked up to the grid and not being used productively. The US currently has 947 GW of renewable generation capacity that is not hooked up to the grid [1]. To put that number into perspective, the US currently has 1160 GW of generation capacity in total [2]. We could almost double our countries generation capacity if we could just hook up the power to the grid. Unfortunately it takes 10 years to build new transmission lines in the US [3]. Changes are going to need to be made to the permitting process, which may include giving more responsibility and agency to FERC to oversee the review process. Congress needs to act on this. If you care about this, you can educate your self and get involved. https://community.citizensclimate.org/topics/clean-energy-permitting-reform https://community.citizensclimate.org/topics/clean-energy-pe... [1] https://emp.lbl.gov/utility-scale-solar https://emp.lbl.gov/utility-scale-solar [2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us-generation-capacity-and-sales.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-... [3] https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/10/permitting-americas-next-big-climate-conundrum/ https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/10/permitting-americ...

sircastor 2y ago
So to be clear, this is just a bureaucracy issue?
- sanxiyn 2y ago
  Yes.
fpgaminer 2y ago
> At the end of 2022, there were at least 947 GW of utility-scale solar power capacity within the interconnection queues across the nation, 456 GW of which include batteries. Seems more likely to me that the utilities are expecting a large growth in consumption in the coming years and built out capacity ahead of time. Seems reasonable.
jonas21 2y ago

xyzzy4747 2y ago

We must first destroy the environment in order to save it.

MrVandemar 2y ago

To those who are drinking deep of the AI kool-aid, know this: this is not remotely sustainable. Anyone who is thinking AI will replace writers and artists and voice-overs and who knows who else ... it's going to cost more money than you think, and it's all getting added to the considerable bill we're running up that will end up costing us everything.

123yawaworht456 2y ago
learn to code
- MrVandemar 2y ago
  Bit of a non-sequitur. But, yes, I do know how to code FWIW.
jahewson 2y ago
Allow me to introduce you to Moore’s law…
- MrVandemar 2y ago
  What about it?

mmoskal 2y ago

One sentence from The Economist seems to explain more than TFA: "Microsoft reported a 31% increase in its indirect (Scope 3) emissions last year from building more data centres (including the carbon found in construction materials) as well as from semiconductors, servers and racks." So no, it's not about lack of renewable electricity. https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/2024/05/16/business https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/2024/05/16/bus...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

latchkey 2y ago

Their Quincy dc has been "under fire" for years now for various issues... 2012: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/09/25/microsoft-quincy-energy-practices-under-fire https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/09/25/micr... 2018: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-wants-to-deploy-72-gensets-in-quincy-wa/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-wants-t... 2020: I wonder if anyone will hold them to this in 2030... https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/energy/article/11428860/microsoft-plans-to-stop-using-diesel-generators-by-2030 https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/energy/article/11428860/m...