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AI Data Centers May Consume More Electricity Than Entire Cities
- mg 2y agoThe brain uses 20% of the human body's energy. As machines become intelligent, maybe AI will account for 20% of global energy consumption?
- comeonbro 2y agoAI will account for 99% of global energy consumption. Solve for equilibrium.
- dmezzetti 2y agoCan we keep The Matrix out of training data? We don't want AI to see what the machines did there for an additional power source.
- ben_w 2y agoFortunately they broke the laws of thermodynamics in the film. Apparently one of the early scripts had human brains helping control fusion reactors rather than directly being batteries, which made more sense. Unfortunately, basically all the various AI uprising dystopia is in the training, and there's a non-zero chance someone gets an AI smart enough to try to do The Matrix/Holographic Doctor Moriaty/I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream/Westworld/etc. despite the various physical impossibilities, which is already bad enough. On the plus side, loads of fiction has some plucky band of adventurers who can defeat the AI and save the world, so there's a good chance a rogue AI will deliberately install a big red switch that turns itself off because it can't tell Hollywood from reality. Unfortunately the same disconnect may result in it shooting the hero that it anticipates will heroically drag themselves to that switch rather than more realistically fall over screaming in pain or silence because they died.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoI guess the price of electricity will have to go up then
- PittleyDunkin 2y agoI don't know how anyone can look at situations like this and claim letting investors run society is going to yield any rational result for our species.
- Noumenon72 2y agoI look at this and think "wow, I wish I could think big enough to do things at the efficient level even though it's so far outside the easy and 'normal' path." Privileging an arbitrary intuition like "AI should use less electricity than a city" would be irrational.
- PittleyDunkin 2y agoWhat's irrational is not starting from base values. It's hard to see how AI in its current form gets us any closer to a materially better future.
- ben_w 2y agoThe surprise for me is that the industrial and academic leaders, with the exception of Yann LeCun, have been saying loudly and constantly "this is bad and we don't know how to make it not bad" and "it has the potential to kill us all" and "optimising anything too hard without concern for literally all of your other values will break those other things you value", and yet a big part of the response has been people saying "pshaw, you're just saying that to sound cool"… …and the messages that are actually getting to people are data centre resource usage, copyright, and cheating in exams.
- PittleyDunkin 2y agoTbh, I can't follow any of the reasoning that AI is a danger to anyone, except through the traditional form of enabling the worst parts of bureaucracy. I just think it's further evidence of a tremendously wasteful and suicidal society.
- ben_w 2y ago
- bwanab 2y agoWhen Alcoa built their aluminum plant in Tennessee in the early part of the 20th century they had to build a series of hydroelectric dams to power the plant. They were using far more power than nearby Knoxville. The headline is clickbait. Nothing to see here.
- i80and 2y agoI don't think you're making a case for it being clickbait; it sounds more like you're affirming the factuality of the headline?
- loeg 2y agoClickbait doesn't mean non-factual.
- croes 2y agoHow many plants did they built? And aluminum has more benefits than these AIs. It’s even disputable if the really raise efficiency of people.
- alchemist1e9 2y ago> And aluminum has more benefits than these AIs. What’s the reasoning behind that assertion?
- unholythree 2y agoI guess you could argue back in 1776 AI and aluminum had a roughly equal impact, only for aluminum to over take AI and become far more important by the early 20th century… Pedantic sarcasm of course.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoOccam's razor? Outside of techno optimist communities made up of people whose livelihood depends on believing in it, AI has become synonymous with slop, hallucination, cheating, and offloading of human labor to shitty bots with cool tech demos but they fall apart going from cursory to sophisticated use.
- pluc 2y agoBut at least Jerry can autocomplete his node script and ask it silly questions. What's the earth limited resources compared to that productivity boost.
- edgyquant 2y agoHow ridiculous, we will have to scale energy to meet the demand and it currently looks like nuclear will be the answer
- croes 2y agoNuclear energy is complex even without sabotage by foreign actors. Didn’t hear any fears that Russia could hit a WEC with a rocket.
- sergiotapia 2y agowe have to accelerate to the point where nuclear energy is abundant and cheap! what is this "limited resource"? energymaxx or end up like germany.
- ben_w 2y agoIf nuclear power plants produce more than solar can provide, you notice direct warming from their waste heat even on a planetary scale, rather than the indirect kind of warming we get from the sky column being marginally more likely to scatter IR emitted by the surface.
- croes 2y agoWhat do you mean by end up like Germany? Producing so much energy that you are a net exporter?
- onetokeoverthe 2y agoAnd from the same people who download 5gb 4k versions of The Simpsons will come even more climate control bs.
- 123yawaworht456 2y ago
- GrumpyNl 2y agoI think it will move in a way that they have to provide their own power.
- curious_cat_163 2y agoAn "average" Qatari consumes 1160x more energy than a Somalian. An average American consumes 84x more energy than a Nepali, and so on... [1] There will be 10 billion of us on this planet by ~ 2050. [2] We might need more energy efficient AI, if everyone is joining the AI party... Please tell me that someone on this hallowed site is working on this. :-) [1] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/energy-consumption-per-capita/country-comparison/ https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/energy-consumpt... [2] https://datatopics.worldbank.org/world-development-indicators/stories/world-population-will-continue-to-grow.html https://datatopics.worldbank.org/world-development-indicator...
- ben_w 2y agoLoads of people here are. Off the top of my head: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30780455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30780455 and https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/helion-energy https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/helion-energy
- curious_cat_163 2y agoThose are more for the supply part of the equation. I was thinking of reducing demand. I don't think that the energy needs that will emanate from "AI" stop at LLM training/inference. I think this recent burst of demand is a starting point.
- jeffbee 2y agoPeople who write about this stuff refuse to believe how much energy an oil refinery or a chlorine factory consumes. But not one single journalist in the history of America has ever written a flashy headline like "Chloralkali process consumes more energy than thirty entire states" even though that headline would be completely accurate.
- benrutter 2y agoI think, especially in the case of an oil factory, people expect it to be awful for the planet. AI is interesting because it isn't expected to be bad for the planet. Or at least was, I think we have all read these articles a lot now.
- jeffbee 2y agoI don't expect AI to be bad for the planet either because unlike many other industries it completely internalizes its energy costs. The industry is naturally incentivized to reduce its energy consumption, because energy is ~100% of their operating cost.
- benrutter 2y agoWell, that sounds good, but that also is true of heating which remains one of the largest contributors of greenhouse gas emissions.
- solardev 2y agoThis is kinda meaningless without knowing how much data goes through a given data center, and ultimately how many people-hours it ends up serving. A data center is just a concentrated processing center for many people's computing needs, so of course it's going to use a lot of power. If you removed the centralized data center and spread it out all over the world, that same amount of computing will be even less efficient, and use even more power, especially accounting for heating and cooling. If the argument is that AI training is wasteful, well, yes it is, but it's also valuable enough that many people and billions of dollars want to keep doing it. And if they bring back enough nuclear, power won't really be an issue anyway. But whether it's concentrated in a data center, and whether a particular data center may end up using more energy than some random city, is completely irrelevant and really misleading as an absolute number instead of a ratio of energy consumption divided by usage.
- alwayslikethis 2y agoA data center is also easier to place near a source of renewable/non emitting power generation. Harder to move entire cities around.
- kiba 2y agoThere's a lot of hype and now virtually every company is claiming to do AI something. Is it valuable, more than just a novelty, enough to pay for all the training and usage? Dunno.
- solardev 2y agoIn the context of the article, that just means "a lot of companies put together are using more energy than some cities". OK, so what? There are a lot of wasteful companies and industries in the world.
- zekrioca 2y agoIt is interesting how you ignore the implications of what has been going on.
- ThomPete 2y agoThis is crypto scare all over again. My answer is still the same you always have to do a cost benefit analysis. AI is many times more valuable than the energy it consumes and thus: AI doesn't have an energy problem, energy have an AI problem.
- it_citizen 2y agoI think the jury is still out on the cost benefit of AI on the long run.
- croes 2y agoDoesn‘t look good at the moment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42220298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42220298
- ben_w 2y agoI think it would be more accurate to say that, if AI wasn't constrained by the limits to production of compute, then everyone else would have an "energy costs too much" problem.
- Majromax 2y agoMore than the residential use of some entire cities. This is a misleading comparison. "AI data centers" aren't a residential use, they're much closer to an industrial one, and they should be considered on that basis. In comparison, a 2007 report on the US Aluminum industry (https://www1.eere.energy.gov/manufacturing/resources/aluminum/pdfs/al_theoretical.pdf#page=114 https://www1.eere.energy.gov/manufacturing/resources/aluminu...) (aluminum is a particularly heavy user of electricity, since its main processes are electric-driven and not chemical/combustion like steel) notes that the US industry used 90e9 kWh/yr in 2003. That's 10GW of power on a continuous basis, comparable to the data center usage discussed in the article. An exact comparison is more difficult because the article discusses a number of individual projects, without aggregating them over time. Is this projected energy usage good? I don't know, but the statement that "AI will be as important to the United States as the aluminum industry" doesn't seem too outlandish.
- dghlsakjg 2y agoIt also assumes no progress in power efficiency during inference. If the price of OpenAIs mini models are indicative of compute, and therefore, energy usage, I would be surprised if we didn’t see a lot of similar energy optimized models in the future.
- Teever 2y agoYeah but Jevons paradox. Computing as a whole has become a lot more efficient compared to say 30 years ago but globally certainly use a lot more compute to make up for that increase in efficiency.
- appplication 2y agoYeah I don’t believe for a second that we’re going to ever see a net decrease in AI energy use during our lifetimes at this point. Besides, the point of discussing this isn’t that AI isn’t efficient enough, it’s that there is a clear path to it consuming absolutely massive amounts of energy, and that will continue to scale at an increasing rate indefinitely. This is a reality we need to expect and plan for. Substantial investments must be made - today - in renewable energy production and storage to meet new demand.
- WillPostForFood 2y agoIncreased demand for, and investment in energy is what we need to get to abundant, cheap, green energy. Stop the stupid incrementalism (e.g., banning gas stoves), and jump to the solution. Or take off the mask and admit the real goal is deindustrialization.
- ben_w 2y agoIncremental transition makes it easier to mange supply and demand. If you're a government and you have planning permits for the next decade of power plants going past you, that does matter regardless of the nature of the power plants. Or at least, it should matter. Texas didn't manage that very well, famously doesn't like regulation, and had power issues that it blamed on renewables but were mainly due to gas not being winterised properly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
- vanilla 2y agoCrypto currencies consume more than entire countries. AI has at least good uses compared to that. I have yet to come across a single good use-case. It will never offset the damage that is has done and is currently still doing. But I am still looking. Web3 is going great... maybe it is time to reduce the energy consumption that is only doing harm.
- bronco21016 2y agoI’m curious to see a detailed analysis on potential impacts to energy costs and how it changes the ROI on things like residential solar. These articles never dive deep enough into the subject to make an informed decision. They just want us to be outraged by how much energy it uses then don’t even acknowledge the other consumers that use just as much or more.
- xcodevn 2y agoWho cares? If it brings benefits to the people who paid for the service, duh!
- kleiba 2y agoYeah, whatever - most of us like a president who does not believe climate change is real and thus this topic does not need to be addressed. Drill, baby, drill! :'(
- richrichie 2y agoThe majority of comments seem to imply that if the future utility is uncertain or unknown, it is OK to disregard climate change implications. HN discourse typically treats climate change as a non-negotiable absolutist issue. Tech (understandably?), as opposed to auto, has a special carve out?