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Data centers use no more than 1.5% of electricity globally[1], and a long LLM query uses only a little more than 5 minutes of general laptop use ~3x the energy

• conception 1mo ago
  So you’re saying we could significantly cut energy use globally by limiting data center build outs? 1.5% is a //huge// amount. If it was a “drop” in your bucket, it would only hold 67 more of those drops.
  • ch4s3 1mo ago
    No, I'm not saying that and I don't think 1.5% is particularly large. Moreover many of these projects are built out with on site 0 carbon generation so they're in some ways a net benefit.
    • cogman10 1mo ago
      The largest projects, like Box Elder County Utah and Pecos County Texas, are using fossil fuels. In fact, I'm unaware of any new AI data center also being built with 0 carbon generation. Do you have a source?
    • hunter-gatherer 1mo ago
      This is wildly out of touch with reality. Have you never seen a construction site? A 0 carbon generation site doesn't exist.
      • ch4s3 1mo ago
        You know what’s meant by that, it refers to ongoing generation emissions.
      • sfn42 1mo ago
        This is so lame man. A few construction vehicles aren't why the world is burning. It's burning because we pump and dig up billions of tons of fossil fuels to burn in large scale power plants, cargo ships etc. And a bunch of other reasons of course, but the main point is we could easily run data centers and everything else includibg most if not all construction vehicles etc on renewables and nuclear if we wanted to. The problem is not that we are building more things that use electricity, the problem is that we are generating electricity using fossil fuels. We should have phased out fossil fuels decades ago yet here we are ramping it up while everyone's bickering about inconsequential bullshit like datacenters. Datacenters are not the problem. Construction is not the problem (except concrete which generates huge emissions but we can't really do much about that). Some things are infinitely easier to fix than others. Power generation is such a thing. We have the solution, we've had it for like a century (nuclear) and we're getting even more solutions. We could run all power production with hardly any fossil fuels if we really wanted, nearly all land transport could be electric. These two changes alone would eliminate the vast majority of emissions. And we can do that, it's realistically possible. We could also probably run global shipping and aviation on non-fossil fuels if we really wanted to, though I don't really know anything about that. There are large scale mining excavators, dozers and trucks running on electricity, and hybrid solutions. Stop bickering about the small stuff. The only thing we should be focused on is transitioning all electricity production to green as fast as possible. That takes care of almost half of all emissions by itself and opens up lots of opportunities for solving other problems without emissions. For example we could use green energy to produce hydrogen from water, or biogas, ethanol etc, and then we'd have emission-free fuels we could use where combustion engines are still necessary. But no let's just bicker about data centers and other inconsequential shit while the world ends.
    • deleted 1mo ago
      [deleted]
    • jamiek88 1mo ago
      Link some zero carbon ones if there are ‘many’.
    • cdrnsf 1mo ago
      Like xAI's running gas generators non-stop?
    • netsharc 1mo ago
      Can I have 1.5% of your net worth? Ohhh, carbon neutral energy generation, if only we could use that to replace the non-neutral energy sources, instead of using it to power virtual X-Ray goggles so MAGA incels can goon at "naked Taylor Swift". Or to answer "please do my work for me" of lazy fucks planet-wide. You know, to stay relevant to the comment thread of "Oceans hit highest temperature on record"...
    • dgellow 1mo ago
      We are already in a very bad situation regarding climate change. Do you really think we have the buffer for an increase in percentage points of energy consumption?
  • dofm 1mo ago
    That figure likely doesn't include crypto mining, either. That's another 0.5% or so. 0.5% is about the entire energy consumption of two Swedens or half a Thailand.
  • deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  • asdfman123 1mo ago
    > we could significantly cut energy use globally by limiting data center build outs? No, we couldn't, because degrowth solutions aren't really an option.
    • api 1mo ago
      I call degrowth "abstinence based" environmental policy in allegory to abstinence based sex education. The latter is the "we don't need condoms or birth control, just teach people not to have sex" thing, which doesn't work either. You really think you're going to convince people to become poorer? Not possible in a democracy. It'd require some kind of ecofascist totalitarian thing where you take peoples' energy and resource use away and fire tear gas and rubber bullets at them when they protest. Or we could build non-carbon-based energy sources. Cause we have those, and they work. You can also have safe sex if you put a rubber thing on your wing-wong.
      • asdfman123 1mo ago
        And right now the fuel for fascism seems to be coming from the newly minted billionaires who own or profit off of the data centers.
      • dgellow 1mo ago
        > It'd require some kind of ecofascist totalitarian That’s correct and eventually that will have to happen. There aren’t much other actual options. It’s mostly a question of how long that can be avoided. We developed a system that blocked us in the current local optimum, with no ways to take the drastic actions we need to handle global issues like climate change. (And to be clear, an ecofascist regime would be horrible to live under)
  • BobbyJo 1mo ago
    Only if you hold the view that AI will not lead to use using energy more efficiently.
    • mrguyorama 1mo ago
      AI cannot break physics. AI cannot magically make engines more efficient or CO2 not a greenhouse gas.
      • BobbyJo 1mo ago
        Is your argument that the world economy is running so close to theoretical maximum efficiency that AI can't improve it?
        • defrost 1mo ago
          More likely that any ideas AI comes up with will be "mid" and face the same implementation obstacles that already exist, coupled with the majority of energy burnt up by AI will go to frivolous ends, making personalised dog whistles, derivitive elevator muzak, et al.
          • BobbyJo 1mo ago
            So you're abandoning your earlier argument about us bumping up against the laws of physics and instead arguing that AI won't make the economy more efficient due to frivolous usage? That's plainly false, as that's just not how markets work over the long term. We only see distortions like this iver the short term due to investor subsidies.
            • defrost 1mo ago
              > So you're abandoning your earlier argument Can you point me to my earlier argument (the time marks are individual comment URLs)
              • 1mo ago
• drdrey 1mo ago
  1.5% of electricity, not energy that would be 0.3% of global energy use
• wongarsu 1mo ago
  1.5% of electricity. That's a significant difference. Only about 1/7th of all our energy usage is electricity 1.5% of global energy use would be a shocking amount. Aviation is at about 3%. 1.5% of global electricity is about 0.2% of global energy use, a much more manageable figure
• yread 1mo ago
  Ah yes, "just" 485 TWh, equal to all electricity consumption of Germany. Drop in the bucket
• mitthrowaway2 1mo ago
  Wow, even with that being electricity rather than energy, that's orders of magnitude more than I would have guessed. That's a tremendous amount of electricity.
• jdiff 1mo ago
  > ~3x the energy of running an LED light for 5 minutes. Why would this not be the energy of running an LED light for 15 minutes?
  • rcpt 1mo ago
    It's an unspoken rule in the data center debate that every metric is completely batshit. Doesn't matter what side you're on, it's always "enough water to irrigate 27 soccer fields" or "as much energy as 1/5th of the average hamburger"
    • ch4s3 1mo ago
      It comes from Our World in Data, highly reputable, and I included the source link.
      • rcpt 1mo ago
        I'm sure that figure is accurate. And the other person in this thread who commented "the entire energy consumption of two Swedens or half a Thailand" is probably also accurate. It's not about accuracy, it's about the units people choose when having these discussions
        • ch4s3 1mo ago
          I lead with 1.5% of global electricity use. But its import to contextualiza that normal AI usage requires less electricity than an evening of watching TV.
• legitster 1mo ago
  When all is said and done, data centers are going to be complimentary to green energy. They can spin up and down to buffer non-linear power nodes. They also represent investment in economic growth that doesn't come from resource extraction or travel or manufacturing.
  • HDBaseT 1mo ago
    Building data centers relies on immense manufacturing. The GPUs, systems, cooling, batteries, etc don't come from no where. They have strict replacement schedules too.
  • ColdStream 1mo ago
    While yes they can spin up and down, there is the deeper question of what it is all for. This is why so many AI proponents always talk about future gains rather than what is happening today. It a lot of what it claimed to be coming doesn't happen then it will all look very silly. Time will tell and depending on were you sit, either we will be there shortly or it will never happen.
  • Mawr 1mo ago
    > They can spin up and down Nope. Every moment that hardware is not ran is wasted money that could have been used to buy something else that's actually productive. Secondary effects like depreciation make this phenomenom even stronger. You've only got a few years to exploit any given piece of hardware before it's obsoleted by newer, more efficient hardware. That's why any hardware investment with a high upfront cost operates as close to 24/7 as possible — nuclear power plants, factories. Continuous operation amortizes the costs as well as possible.
• tzs 1mo ago
  Laptop use and LED light use (and most other uses of electricity) are not increasing so rapidly that they can not be accommodated by the normal expansion in electric system capacity that has been part of long term planning for quite a while. Instead much of it is being handled by bringing new fossil power plants on line that would not have been built if not for all the new data centers. The other things that are causing significant increases in electricity use, like more people getting heat pumps and EVs, are all very spread out and so are much less likely to force new fossil fuel power plants.