A while back, I published Water Consumption Increases 20% Because of AI which looked how water consumption was increasing due to AI. Recently Google and Microsoft have indicated that they will struggle to meet their net zero targets due to AI driving up data centre usage and energy consumption.
We have seen improvements in the efficiency of AI, however this hasn't decreased energy consumption with the extra efficiency being leveraged to improve AI, and it is assumed this will continue for some time.
Companies are trying to offset the carbon impacts with renewable energy, however there is insufficient renewable energy, so other energy consumers are forced to use fossil fuel energy sources to meet their needs.
- Global Data Centre energy consumption expected to reach 4.5% of global energy consumption by 2030.
- Water consumption expected to reach 6.6bn cubic meters by 2027, two-thirds of the water consumed in England.
The next time you reach for ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot, consider the impact to the environment.
Every month, there are new breakthroughs in AI technology that enables companies to do more with less..... But that didn’t result in the same AI systems using less electricity; instead, it resulted in the same amount of electricity being used to make even better AI systems. In economics, that phenomenon is known as “Jevons’ paradox”, after the economist who noted that the improvement of the steam engine by James Watt, which allowed for much less coal to be used, instead led to a huge increase in the amount of the fossil fuel burned in England. As the price of steam power plummeted following Watt’s invention, new uses were discovered that wouldn’t have been worthwhile when power was expensive.
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