A perfect storm is brewing IMO.
AI to Significantly Increase Energy Consumption: Report
BY
ANDREW ROSSOW •
OCTOBER 02, 2023
Wall Street is buzzing with optimism over artificial intelligence (AI), as evidenced by the 26% year-to-date surge in the Nasdaq.
However, AI’s rapid growth brings an unseen toll: an exponential increase in energy consumption, according to a
report.
A study from the
University of Washington reveals that OpenAI’s
ChatGPT alone uses energy equivalent to 33,000 U.S. households daily.
“The energy consumption of something like ChatGPT inquiry compared to some inquiry on your email, for example, is going to be probably 10 to 100 times more power hungry,” said UW assistant professor Sajjad Moazeni.
Moazeni, who joined UW as an assistant Electrical and Computer Engineering professor, also served as a postdoctoral research scientist at the Bioelectronic Systems Lab at Columbia University. During his tenure, he plans to continue his work in emerging devices and large-scale, energy-efficient integrated systems that outperform current cloud computing and mobile platforms.
On the Shoulders of Giants
Despite AI’s current energy imprint, today’s tech giants such as
Google,
Microsoft, and
Amazon, will continue to serve as the backbone of this AI expansion, forcing a significant shift towards energy-intensive graphics processing units (GPUs) over the traditional CPUs.
Brady Brim-Deforest, CEO of Formula Monks, told
Yahoo Finance that for the next decade, GPUs will be the core of AI infrastructure, due to the extremely high levels of energy required.
“And GPUs consume 10 to 15 times the amount of power per processing cycle than CPUs do,” he added.
Prior to ChatGPT’s national media attention, research conducted by University of Pennsylvania professor Benjamin C. Lee, and Harvard professor David Brooks, demonstrated that data center energy usage increased by 25% a year on average between 2015 and 2021.
But turning to renewable energy deployments, there is a “fairly large gap between growth rates,” Lee clarified. During that same period, U.S. Energy Information Administration data revealed an annual growth rate in renewable deployment of 7 percent.
Cloud Providers
Cloud providers like Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure are now trying to offset their respective carbon footprints.
Azure, for example, claims to have maintained carbon neutrality since 2012, with an ambitious goal to be carbon-negative by 2030. Google and Amazon have also set net-zero carbon targets, with Google aiming to achieve “net-zero emissions” across all its operations by 2030, and Amazon expects to power its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025.
But Lee pointed out that claiming “net zero” status doesn’t equate to being “carbon-free.”
However, Lee warned, “Net zero doesn’t mean you’re carbon-free.”
There will be hours of the day where you don’t have enough sun or enough wind, but you’re still going to be drawing energy straight from the grid at whatever mix the grid will provide to you,” he clarified.
Editor’s note: This article was written by an nft now staff member in collaboration with OpenAI’s GPT-4.
