The US has the most data centers today, with 33 percent of the world’s approximately 8,000 data centers. It’s also the country with the most Bitcoin mining. The IEA forecasts a “rapid pace” of growth for data center electricity consumption in the US over the next couple of years, rising from roughly 4 percent of US demand in 2022 to 6 percent by 2026.
ALL data center energy usage only makes up 4-6% of US energy use.
Most tech firms that run data centers don’t reveal what percentage of their energy use processes A.I. The exception is Google, which says “machine learning” — the basis for humanlike A.I. — accounts for somewhat less than 15 percent of its data centers’ energy use.
So AI energy use is maybe less than one percent of total US energy use if we extrapolate from the upper range of data center use and apply the relative usage of data centers of one of the leading AI development firms.
Yeah, this definitely seems like the “AI Boogeyman” is on par with other contributing factors for why energy grids are struggling. /s
Maybe we should be taking a closer look at passive device energy usage given double digit percentages of home energy use (35% of total energy use) goes to “energy vampires”. Though maybe that version of the article might have received less clicks?
Huh. Seems like ai startups and clean manufacturing should invest in building their own solar and wind farms, mini nuclear power plants, and geothermal generation plants. If the AI or whatever doesn’t work out, they can fall back on selling the power they generate. if it does work out, they don’t have to pay grid prices for their power needs.
I think they are doing this above board, so it’s just “contracts”. It’s not illegal, just shortsighted. Just like lobbying isn’t technically bribery because it’s “official bribery” so it’s got a different name.
Why should power be available to all? If the activity is both incredibly wasteful and brings no value to the public or to the state or to the utility company, why should the utility not be able to prioritize getting power to people who need power to live?
There are these huge crypto mining farms in Texas, and people are literally dying each year from the power grid failing. Why should the crypto farms be protected when they could be cut off in times when human survival is at risk?
Power is taxed and the proceeds go toward what the public has deemed important. That is quite a bit of value to the public.
or to the state
In addition to taxes, it brings money into the state rather than allowing that money to go elsewhere. This means jobs at the power plants and more economic activity in your your state, which is is a positive feedback loop of goodness.
or to the utility company
The utility company is getting lots of sales. Kinda hard to imagine how this isn’t good for the one selling more power.
people are literally dying each year from the power grid failing
The power grid in Texas failed because it wasn’t properly winterized. Crypto miners existing didn’t cause that issue and booting them doesn’t winterize the grid.
You don’t have to be thrilled about something. But let’s not throw out random unrelated things for why the thing you don’t like shouldn’t exist.
Your examples operate under the assumption that power is limitless. If people don’t have power because crypto cunts are bogarting it, they won’t care at all that there is tax money coming in. Further, since it is a limited resource, there isn’t an increase in tax revenue, it’s just being paid by someone else at the expense of people not having access to power. Likewise, the power companies are still serving the same amount of juice, so they aren’t getting more money, it’s just coming in from a single entity instead of from thousands of individuals.
I haven’t read any of the agreements these crypto companies have, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they got tax and other financial breaks, further hurting people that are losing out on power.
There is little to no benefit at all for the general population by allowing unlimited access to power for crypto. Maybe it brings in a couple more jobs, but it’s not like a power plant has a linear scale of employees required to power output. So it could enrich a handful of people by taking resources from many more people.
Lol. There’s no proceeds from taxing power when you’re paying cryptominers not to use it. The grid in Texas is so horribly mismanaged. If we’re going to offer something to these customers, it should be free solar panels to help wean them off the grid.
It comes back to the age old question: how should goods and services be distributed. It’s the base of every civilization. By religious edict? By a study of who needs it the most? A system of reciprocal gifting? Precious metals? Or by some tokens for exchange?
We went hard for the latter so history books can write why this is a bad idea.
I’m aware of breakthroughs but even once we figure out how to generate electricity it may still take decades for it to become cost effective with alternatives. It’s going to be a long time.
At our current pace I agree, so I think we need to be doing a fusion moonshot to speed things up. And also investing in renewables and other options. The rising cost of fossil fuels, both in climate damage and in economic terms is taking humanity down fast.
I can’t wait for the day in 2 years when people look back and realize how fucking dumb and useless AI is for 90% of the global population, outside of being lazy or incapable. It’s sad we have to always fight through the bandwagoning steps, and letting all these companies fight to get in the door before it takes off, and fucking up society and our planet in the process. Crypto adoption was exactly the same, broadband, dial-up…and so on going backwards. It will settle eventually, but everyone has to deal with this bullshit (and suffer economically in some cases) until it does. It sucks.
I’m not at all convinced that AI is going to be like Crypto - Crypto “solved” a problem that only online drug dealers etc had. AI “solves” a problem lots of companies have in terms of summarizing masses of data, search problems, and currently various rote tasks.
I’m also not convinced dial up through to broadband was a bandwagon… Those were important technological steps forward.
I think most of this is a problem with electricity companies just not wanting to invest in their infrastructure at all. Almost any other company would love explosive demand, and would be working to make ever more money on selling more of their product. What’s even sillier IMHO is just that there’s huge growth in solar farms and the like providing generation capacity for the utility without them having to build anything.
You can either use technology to improve your life in whatever way it allows, or you can be resistant, bitch and whine about it to anyone who will listen to how you don’t use something, and not receive the benefits of that technology.
Lemmy is the only social media I’ve ever used, but I haven’t spent the last 20 years whining to people about how I think myspace/facebook/reddit/100s other companies are bad and doing nothing positive. Only consuming electricity to produce nothing of value. Plenty of people do use it and benefit from it. I chose not to. I did chose to take up lots of other technology that has been beneficial to my life.
AI is and will likely in the future be very useful and technologically significant. But I am not convinced it is anywhere near the world changing levels companies like OpenAI (ClosedAI) or microsoft make it out to be. Gen AI will become a useful but largely mundane tool that people will use to help themselves be a little more productive in the future. Think how face detection helps you take better portraits rather than replace the need to take a photograph.
The current problem is that all the excitement is around AI being able to completely revolutionise work and replace workers. Money and effort is being poured into that goal; however, those investing are going to rapidly find out that we don’t know how to create a tool that does that yet and, we are likely a very long way from finding out how.
[Very sarcasm] I’m sure real live actual people will get priority if any decisions need to be made. Texas for one has shown that power (and everything else, really) goes where it’s needed to ensure that everyone is safe and well and certainly no one is allowed to just die cold, or their building fall apart or anything like that.
Nobody would do anything about it anyway so ohhh wellllll 🤷
Would have been nice if we were installing nuclear plants for the last two decades (second best time to start is today). Instead we are getting wind/solar backed by natural gas.
Utility-scale batteries are getting to the point of displacing a bunch of that gas. Nuclear is sufficiently expensive that we’re probably only going to use modest amounts of it.
I think nuclear is expensive in part because we didn’t build enough of it. The more you build of something the more costs come down.
An opportunity was lost in the 80s when everybody abandoned nuclear as oil prices were coming down and energy demand stagnated. And Three Mile Island just happened which, understandably, made utilities nervous to invest in nuclear.
China and South Korea have much lower plant build cost and timelines. The really high delays and cost increases in the west are more an indication of problems in beauracracy and contract writing than fundamental to nuclear technology.
The human brain is powered by calories. Food is a renewable energy source.
But we decided they weren’t efficient enough and now we want to replace them with LLMs, powered by orders of magnitude more electricity than the workstations the humans would use.
And no one stopped to think “Hey maybe adding significantly more power usage isn’t the best idea right now.”
This has nothing to do with llms. We’ve needed a drastic improvement to energy production for ages now, but infrastructure budgets never sound cool enough to actually get an increase, so here we are.