I've been concerned about this (electricity)aspect of AI for quite some time as I've watched my bills & those of family & friends bills climb ever higher. I made the connection of that rise to the growth of AI by paying attention to the very few stories that mention AI power consumption. There's also the need for water resources to make AI operate. Why are we consumers being stuck with the bill? Time to speak up before we are all impoverished to make tech bros richer.
You ask "why are we consumers being stuck with the bill?" Simple. It's called socializing costs while privatizing profit. By getting us to pay for one of their inputs, they make more money.
It is the wealthy, finally, FINALLY throwing off the shackles of the proletariat. Give it a few years and we will pronounce the proletariat vermin and start making robo-exterminators.
I hold great hope that advances in AI will allow it to take over all creative aspects of life--writing, painting, sculpting, making poetry, etc.--so that I can focus on doing menial labor like washing dishes or mowing lawns.
Another problem: getting power from the generators to the new AI data centers. There is tremendous friction in building new power lines, getting permissions etc. All the more reason to demand that the AI folks build their own power plants where they need them.
True. I was down there during a drought. Douglas lake was down about 50' from peak. The "bathtub ring" was very impressive. I was, however, thinking more of the electrical generation capabilities. Demand has increased with population but decreased with the shutdown of much of the Oak Ridge nuclear plant.
Elon Musk has essentially already done this in Memphis. He’s blown through every air permit and treats the violations not as fines but as a cost of doing business.
Residential customers have always subsidized large industrial users. We are “peaky”. Basically our usage when we get home from work spikes and utilities always need a reserve to ramp up to meet that. Adding a data center that hums along just makes our peakiness even larger. Which means investor owned utilities start to salivate about building something that their investors get a 10% guaranteed rate of return on whatever they build. And we all get to pay for it for the next 40 years.
I don't like this but it seems spot on economically and politically. Workers and those of us who live here in the swiftly changing Earth environment need to remember Russia, the US, and Europe regard the arctic as money opportunitites opening up right and left. That draws many investors. The issues of electricity generation, water supply, land supply, and seller networks are of importance to all AI tech bros. Technology people, like IEEE (electrical engineers), have known AI growth is having a large effect on our energy grids, our water use, our land use, and effects on local populations of humans and all other living species. IEEE types have known green energy contained our many needed solutions. They have been calling the now tech bros on their abuse of Earth lands for at least a decade. Tech bros also hate regulation of any kind. Many people have talked about the problems in these areas. This column presents many of the problems economists are saying exist. Critics from the technology field itself are saying many of the same things; this evidence and questions are going unanswered, and arrogantly trod all over by men like Mr. Altman in their rush to obtain resources. It is instructive to read his history, and those of men jockeying to own as many Earth resources as possible.
The problem is that local governments are responsible for approving data-center construction, and where the electricity originates to power these energy-hungry centers are not usually in the approval process, as Big Tech has the lobbying power vs residential customers, and just grabs their share of the grid, coz jobs.
Yes, it would be ideal if data-center approvals mandated self-generating electrical power, but that of course would greatly up capex for the AI companies...much easier for local ratepayers to bear the costs in higher monthly bills, don't you know.
And paying for AI development and taking all the energy and water resources they need is exactly why the tech bros and billionaires bought trump. They saw the opportunity to get rich on our money and labor - again! When do the slaves revolt?
Energy efficiency is the main advantage of human (and animal) intelligence over its artificial copy.
The level of energy efficiency nature has achieved will not be easy to reach. After all, evolution has ruthlessly selected for energy efficiency over hundreds of millions of years.
Currently, AI requires multiple millions of watts for tasks the human brain does with less than 100 watts.
As a result, current AI will likely hit an energy wall in the near future and AI research will have to shift focus to something like puzzles solved per kilowatt hour.
Water consumption is ignored in everyone's projections. You can build your own power plant but you can't build your own water supply. These new data centers are all water cooled. There's not enough water to go around. We need to decide if AI is more important than having water to drink.
With respect, this choice between AI and drinking water is bit far-fetched. Air cooling is always available as alternative to water cooling, it is just slightly less efficient (uses more power). Authorities can ban water cooling or price water higher such that people prefer air cooling.
They seem to be building them in LV, too. I find this really puzzling - it’s not a secret this is the desert, that we’re in the second decade of drought, or that data centers use a billion metric shit tons of water daily.
The potential for gross pollution threatens communities, and that’s before we even discuss the obsolescence of data crunching equipment or risks posed to the public when data centers burn. Or additional threats posed to wildlife & environment.
I won’t ask why so many are pushing data centers so recklessly, since that’s obviously money. But, doesn’t it seem really maladaptive to choose the money when the other equities involved so clearly include protecting American & other lives.
Protecting lives and other irrelevant social goods have never been the responsibility of business. Just ask shareholder primacy. We will simply ask the shareholders to live somewhere else, where there are no businesses.
No, it’s the responsibility of government on behalf of its boss, the people, to protect our air and water and ensure no business uses excessive resources or otherwise harms people or places.
I read that the dry air in the desert is better for the computer equipment than muggy moist air found in places that actually HAVE water. Which is why they should be required to provide their own water as well as electricity!
Water wouldn't directly touch the computer circuits, but it is used to tranfer heat away from the hot circuits so they don't melt or burn.
As in my other post, the water of the ocean (or Great Lakes) could be used for cooling. Most people live more or less near the oceans (or Great Lakes), which is where the power of the data centres would be used.
Sorry Turgut, You're just plain wrong! Not only is air-cooling far less efficient, but the producing the extra electricity required to cool with fans also consumes water. And btw, try cooling a nuclear reactor core using fans!
We don’t HAVE to use pressurized water reactor nuclear power plants. We designed them that way because we know a LOT about the water -steam cycles and the US Navy was one of the first customers for nuclear power plants. Given all the controls around nuclear isotopes innovation is challenging.
There are other designs for nuclear power that use different cooling mediums. Fermi 1 outside of Detroit used sodium, which is a bad idea btw, and pebble bed use gas.
Tiered pricing should go a long way to reduce water waste. (Look at satellite views of Phoenix and all of the swimming pools—aka evaporation ponds—in that desert city. That's a hell of a lot of "drinking water" being used.)
The regional power supply still has legacy natural gas plants that take up the slack in generation when hydro and renewable generation is diminished. These plants were once standby, but AI demand may cause these plants to become primary power sources—of heat from plant cooling and heat-intensifying CO2 gas.
[BTW, it's likely that natgas as a power plant fuel is worse than coal in terms of releasing greenhouse gases, though coal burning is much nastier for us in the lower atmosphere.]
I have renewed hope in indoor farming solutions for growing a lot of food: no pesticides, minimal fertilizer, minimal water, no reliance on backbreaking outdoor labor, and much smaller land footprint. (And we don't care as much about growing thirsty alfalfa that way in the Arizona desert.)
Interesting to think that the cooling cycle can be closed regarding water (or another medium). Geothermal heating is well known, but geothermal cooling could, imho, be also easily achievable, eliminating the continual demand for water.
Right, and we should keep in mind that if water is heated, even a degree or two, and then returned to the river there is a loss of water - about 1.6 litres for every kWh. The returned water will cool to the temperature of the river, evaporating some to do so.
Water was an issue in Tucson where the City Council voted against Project Blue. Not only should AI bring the electricity, they need to bring that water that is NOT evaporating into the air.
Most of the world's water is in the oceans, near most of the world's population. The question becomes how do you get the power needed to the ocean. One answer is tidal power.
Then of course there is the cost of building the power plants in the ocean (or on the shore used by people).
The underlying tech in this boom is, as computer scientists say, O(N⁶) to train and O(N²) to run. In layman's terms, 10 times more data means 1,000,000 times more training time and power, and 100 times more time and power to run. This isn't a failure of not "nerding hard enough"; it's built into the very fabric of how the models work and how NVidia builds its chips.
Nobody has O(N²) data center capacity, and nobody can build it.
The proponents are playing the "infinite number of monkeys" game not only with a decidedly finite number of monkeys, but with monkeys that quickly get wildly expensive to keep and which will never solve the problem at hand.
Absolutely correct. The current approach does not scale. Modest, incremental improvements in performance come at phenomenal cost. The brute force approach of the tech bro's simply burns (our) money.
While I'm no fan of what's being marketed as 'AI', I am definitely a fan of narrowly-scoped and more cost-effective →expert systems← to solve specific classes of otherwise overwhelming problems (meteor monitoring, folding proteins, brain injury, filtering potential drug molecules, etc.).
This kind of sums up Trump's economic policies: disconnected, spurious, misinformed, confused.
Trump has no idea where he's heading. It's not even the case of putting the cart before the horses. It's horses in every direction pulling the cart into a pile of rubble.
I am very pleased that humanity has progressed far enough that society no longer functions to enhance the stand of living and lifestyle of all of its members, but instead now functions to bend all resources and funnel all wealth into the hands of a few individuals no matter what the cost to everyone else. /s
I think it is very important to remember that, during the campaign, Trump openly solicited $1B from the oil companies for his campaign. His aversion to renewable energy may be driven in part by this campaign promise.
The irony for those oil company donors is that Trump's erratic policies are making it unprofitable* to operate a lot of wells, so they're shutting down a lot of rigs and not drilling very many new ones. I only recently learned how much steel pipe is used in drilling wells...and then is left in the ground.
_________
*Not worth it for oil prices under $60/bbl and for many wells not even $65/bbl.
Oh yeah. I lived near oil fields when I was growing up. My father was a welder and crew pusher in the oil fields. There's a huge amount of steel in well drilling.
His hostility towards wind power is famously known to have been caused by the Scottish government building a wind generation facility within view of one of his golf courses.
It is assumed that you can't *not* pay for AI and cryptocurrency through your electric bill. Very much like NVIDIA and AMD can't *not* pay 15% protection money to keep their China business going.
We will be putting out a white paper on the topic of the critical mismatch between the expected demand for electricity and supply by 2035. It will be up in a few days. It will be free to download at the FutureMetrics website.
Dominion Power (VA) wants me to pay a surcharge for renewable energy. Even though wind and solar is cheaper. Yes, I know that first we need investment, but isn't that THEIR job that they ought to be doing without begging me to subsidize it? Shouldn't they be doing it anyway?
It’s true, the utilities do the same thing here in Massachusetts. So the people who end up paying are those who actually care about the environment. Others get free ride.
We are in the process of getting solar panels in order to qualify for the tax credit that the Republicans have arranged to kill after December 2025. (Installation must be completed by 31 December.) However, solar panels are not a panacea. In our area, we will save the most money during the day in the summer, with lower savings in the spring and fall, with winter being the least. For various reasons, we could not do a storage battery. Solar does not, for most of us allow self-sufficiency, only some cost savings, and it will take about ten years to break even, although perhaps less if electrical costs escalate.
Where we live just north of Baltimore MD, we do still have to purchase power off the grid in the winter. When we put in our solar we also converted to geothermal heating/cooling, so we no longer use oil or straight electricity for that, which also helps the environment and saves money. Good luck getting your system installed before the deadline. Sorry you couldn’t do battery storage. That’s what initially started our search for solar is to have a backup energy source other than wood in a wood stove.
Home solar can never be as cost-effective as sub-grid or grid-scale solar. (And you have to deal with cleaning and replacing if damaged.) That said, upper-income homeowners can afford to pay for the reliability of generators and solar/storage systems in the face of an unreliable grid.
I live in south central PA. Our electric supplier is a co-op known as Adam’s Electric. We had to jump through a lot of regulatory hoops, but it was worth it. I guess some states do not treat solar suppliers equally, but PA is not one. We do not burn fossil fuels or pollute the environment to produce electricity. In a sane world everyone would be encouraged to do this!
Cryto is a major concern for me. All that enery consumption for nothing other than one more grift for some, laundering money for others. I can do without AI too.
"But will we do the sensible thing?" Of course not! Not with tRump in power, the right thingn will never be done. He fights the right thing time and again. The tech bros own him. along with the crypto (because of his own dealings with it to the tune of 2.6 billion in his own pocket in 7 months!). He has no inclination towards helping the middle or lower classes, let them eat cake AND all the higher bills that come with these two monstrosities. Higher and higher our electric bills will go, higher and more inflationary than everything else, All for the benefit of the few...AGAIN. Which in turn is making life barely affordable for the middle class and unaffordable for the lower middle class and the poor already. No folks, until we rise up and take it all back we're fucked by the the right. But hey, I guess this is what we , well, THEY, 77 million fools, voted for.....
This is actually my entire job. Running models and simulations to inform utilities what they need in 5 years to be able to provide customers with electricity when they want and need it. Looking at projections, we don’t have the physical capacity to install every data center going into the queue. Not enough chips. Globally. It’s very speculative. Data center developers hedging all over the place getting their sites greenlit and then selling that approval to your AI folks. They should bring their own power. Or co-locate. Elon Musk has done this in Memphis. It’s not going well. Asking for profit folks to solve a problem leads to for profit folks not caring about the people near the data centers. They will gladly pay the fine for violating air and water permits. Small price to pay for them. There is a real possibility we are going to run out of capacity but we are going to run out of energy waiting for the gas plants to be built. Renewables are faster to bring online and will provide energy. What is concerning for ratepayers is having to pay for the overbuilds when only a fraction of these data centers get built. Stranded assets still get paid off even if they don’t run.
If AI sucks up all the energy, it is also hard to see how US manufacturing can become competitive again. Btw, food automats still remain popular for some reason in the Netherlands. Not sure what this tells us about the Dutch.
Good Morning, Professor! Tucson, AZ, just turned down an AI Center. Citizens were working overtime to make that refusal happen. Water use and supply played a significant role in that. Could you explore the water needs, also?
I've been concerned about this (electricity)aspect of AI for quite some time as I've watched my bills & those of family & friends bills climb ever higher. I made the connection of that rise to the growth of AI by paying attention to the very few stories that mention AI power consumption. There's also the need for water resources to make AI operate. Why are we consumers being stuck with the bill? Time to speak up before we are all impoverished to make tech bros richer.
You ask "why are we consumers being stuck with the bill?" Simple. It's called socializing costs while privatizing profit. By getting us to pay for one of their inputs, they make more money.
Labor used to be a major input into a capitalistic system. Now we throw our regulations and resources into the blender for the enrichment of the few.
That is actually an interesting observation. Labor no longer accounts for much. Profits come from managing money and its invisible cousin, crypto.
It is the wealthy, finally, FINALLY throwing off the shackles of the proletariat. Give it a few years and we will pronounce the proletariat vermin and start making robo-exterminators.
Too true for words. Socializing costs until those costs can be privatized. Them Capitalists are a clever bunch
I hold great hope that advances in AI will allow it to take over all creative aspects of life--writing, painting, sculpting, making poetry, etc.--so that I can focus on doing menial labor like washing dishes or mowing lawns.
Hold my beer: I agree with you, BUT I want Zuckerberg or Altman mowing endless lawns for eternity.
Think I'd rather see them consigned to cleaning out sewage plants ...
Then washing dishes and mowing lawns will be the new art forms
lord have mercy
Hey - it takes a lot of skill to wash a lawn properly!
There will also be openings for raking the forest.
You have obviously not tried mowing dishes.
True.
😺😺😺
Good one!
Digging potatoes 🥔
The doing art vs. doing dishes remark is a meme started by Joanna Maciejewska.
https://x.com/AuthorJMac/status/1773679197631701238
She's definitely correct in her assessment!
AI creativity is using the method of 1000 monkeys to write shakespeare.
It is only pretend creativity.
Hahahahaha...Me, too.
Another problem: getting power from the generators to the new AI data centers. There is tremendous friction in building new power lines, getting permissions etc. All the more reason to demand that the AI folks build their own power plants where they need them.
And provide their own water source. The water requirements of data centers is even more alarming.
Yes! I've become more and more concerned about their water use, which does not get nearly enough attention:
https://www.tpr.org/environment/2025-08-15/big-techs-big-thirst-ais-demand-for-texas-water
https://ethicalgeo.org/the-cloud-is-drying-our-rivers-water-usage-of-ai-data-centers/ (long, but lots of information)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/technology/meta-data-center-water.html
(Last 2 articles about the Morris family in Georgia)
Sounds like they should be building these things in TVA territory.
TVA territory is no longer the unlimited source of water it once was!
True. I was down there during a drought. Douglas lake was down about 50' from peak. The "bathtub ring" was very impressive. I was, however, thinking more of the electrical generation capabilities. Demand has increased with population but decreased with the shutdown of much of the Oak Ridge nuclear plant.
We'll soon see underwater data centres which depend on tidal power.
Elon Musk has essentially already done this in Memphis. He’s blown through every air permit and treats the violations not as fines but as a cost of doing business.
DonnyJon bragged that he ignored the violations and fines and "eventually, they went away."
Residential customers have always subsidized large industrial users. We are “peaky”. Basically our usage when we get home from work spikes and utilities always need a reserve to ramp up to meet that. Adding a data center that hums along just makes our peakiness even larger. Which means investor owned utilities start to salivate about building something that their investors get a 10% guaranteed rate of return on whatever they build. And we all get to pay for it for the next 40 years.
I don't like this but it seems spot on economically and politically. Workers and those of us who live here in the swiftly changing Earth environment need to remember Russia, the US, and Europe regard the arctic as money opportunitites opening up right and left. That draws many investors. The issues of electricity generation, water supply, land supply, and seller networks are of importance to all AI tech bros. Technology people, like IEEE (electrical engineers), have known AI growth is having a large effect on our energy grids, our water use, our land use, and effects on local populations of humans and all other living species. IEEE types have known green energy contained our many needed solutions. They have been calling the now tech bros on their abuse of Earth lands for at least a decade. Tech bros also hate regulation of any kind. Many people have talked about the problems in these areas. This column presents many of the problems economists are saying exist. Critics from the technology field itself are saying many of the same things; this evidence and questions are going unanswered, and arrogantly trod all over by men like Mr. Altman in their rush to obtain resources. It is instructive to read his history, and those of men jockeying to own as many Earth resources as possible.
Yes…let the “peak demand charges” begin! Oh…sorry…they are already on my bill.
Yes, but they're going to grow - exponentially.
The problem is that local governments are responsible for approving data-center construction, and where the electricity originates to power these energy-hungry centers are not usually in the approval process, as Big Tech has the lobbying power vs residential customers, and just grabs their share of the grid, coz jobs.
Yes, it would be ideal if data-center approvals mandated self-generating electrical power, but that of course would greatly up capex for the AI companies...much easier for local ratepayers to bear the costs in higher monthly bills, don't you know.
And paying for AI development and taking all the energy and water resources they need is exactly why the tech bros and billionaires bought trump. They saw the opportunity to get rich on our money and labor - again! When do the slaves revolt?
Mass non-payment of electric bills? But then we'd just get cut off, I suppose. Maybe going off the grid?
Energy efficiency is the main advantage of human (and animal) intelligence over its artificial copy.
The level of energy efficiency nature has achieved will not be easy to reach. After all, evolution has ruthlessly selected for energy efficiency over hundreds of millions of years.
Currently, AI requires multiple millions of watts for tasks the human brain does with less than 100 watts.
As a result, current AI will likely hit an energy wall in the near future and AI research will have to shift focus to something like puzzles solved per kilowatt hour.
Water consumption is ignored in everyone's projections. You can build your own power plant but you can't build your own water supply. These new data centers are all water cooled. There's not enough water to go around. We need to decide if AI is more important than having water to drink.
Don't golf courses use more water than AI datacenters?
I do like that some golf courses, at least, only use non-potable water (i.e., partially treated wastewater).
Its good until the sprinklers come on while you are putting.
For now, perhaps
With respect, this choice between AI and drinking water is bit far-fetched. Air cooling is always available as alternative to water cooling, it is just slightly less efficient (uses more power). Authorities can ban water cooling or price water higher such that people prefer air cooling.
That doesn't work in the desert and Arizona seems to be a target state for those horrid things at the moment.
Tucson just turned down AI coming to town.
They seem to be building them in LV, too. I find this really puzzling - it’s not a secret this is the desert, that we’re in the second decade of drought, or that data centers use a billion metric shit tons of water daily.
The potential for gross pollution threatens communities, and that’s before we even discuss the obsolescence of data crunching equipment or risks posed to the public when data centers burn. Or additional threats posed to wildlife & environment.
I won’t ask why so many are pushing data centers so recklessly, since that’s obviously money. But, doesn’t it seem really maladaptive to choose the money when the other equities involved so clearly include protecting American & other lives.
Protecting lives and other irrelevant social goods have never been the responsibility of business. Just ask shareholder primacy. We will simply ask the shareholders to live somewhere else, where there are no businesses.
No, it’s the responsibility of government on behalf of its boss, the people, to protect our air and water and ensure no business uses excessive resources or otherwise harms people or places.
I read that the dry air in the desert is better for the computer equipment than muggy moist air found in places that actually HAVE water. Which is why they should be required to provide their own water as well as electricity!
That makes sense. They highlight dry air and ignore the bad effects those centers will have on our air quality.
We’ve never needed our environmental and consumer agencies to function & flex more than we do right now…
Water wouldn't directly touch the computer circuits, but it is used to tranfer heat away from the hot circuits so they don't melt or burn.
As in my other post, the water of the ocean (or Great Lakes) could be used for cooling. Most people live more or less near the oceans (or Great Lakes), which is where the power of the data centres would be used.
Sorry Turgut, You're just plain wrong! Not only is air-cooling far less efficient, but the producing the extra electricity required to cool with fans also consumes water. And btw, try cooling a nuclear reactor core using fans!
We don’t HAVE to use pressurized water reactor nuclear power plants. We designed them that way because we know a LOT about the water -steam cycles and the US Navy was one of the first customers for nuclear power plants. Given all the controls around nuclear isotopes innovation is challenging.
There are other designs for nuclear power that use different cooling mediums. Fermi 1 outside of Detroit used sodium, which is a bad idea btw, and pebble bed use gas.
Sodium never worked commercially. It’s extremely reactive and is very hard to work with.
California already requires this for cooling towers near the ocean.
This is not true. Water is just not a relevant concern here.
https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about?open=false#%C2%A7water
If you want to save water, and you currently eat meat, go veg one day a week, and you'll have saved FAR more water than your internet habits consume.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/theres-plenty-of-water-for-data-centers
Tiered pricing should go a long way to reduce water waste. (Look at satellite views of Phoenix and all of the swimming pools—aka evaporation ponds—in that desert city. That's a hell of a lot of "drinking water" being used.)
The regional power supply still has legacy natural gas plants that take up the slack in generation when hydro and renewable generation is diminished. These plants were once standby, but AI demand may cause these plants to become primary power sources—of heat from plant cooling and heat-intensifying CO2 gas.
And the rising cost of the natgas itself will make their power even costlier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHfwTFEKgg0
[BTW, it's likely that natgas as a power plant fuel is worse than coal in terms of releasing greenhouse gases, though coal burning is much nastier for us in the lower atmosphere.]
Actually, the new water supply solution being actively chased in many places, including Southern California is "toilet to tap." Check it out!
To drink AND to grow food. In some areas with hot, dry summers data water has been diverted from municipal and agricultural use.
I have renewed hope in indoor farming solutions for growing a lot of food: no pesticides, minimal fertilizer, minimal water, no reliance on backbreaking outdoor labor, and much smaller land footprint. (And we don't care as much about growing thirsty alfalfa that way in the Arizona desert.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW-21CHDkIU
Interesting to think that the cooling cycle can be closed regarding water (or another medium). Geothermal heating is well known, but geothermal cooling could, imho, be also easily achievable, eliminating the continual demand for water.
I know what my vote is.
Or water to grow crops,
Right, and we should keep in mind that if water is heated, even a degree or two, and then returned to the river there is a loss of water - about 1.6 litres for every kWh. The returned water will cool to the temperature of the river, evaporating some to do so.
Water was an issue in Tucson where the City Council voted against Project Blue. Not only should AI bring the electricity, they need to bring that water that is NOT evaporating into the air.
Most of the world's water is in the oceans, near most of the world's population. The question becomes how do you get the power needed to the ocean. One answer is tidal power.
Then of course there is the cost of building the power plants in the ocean (or on the shore used by people).
The underlying tech in this boom is, as computer scientists say, O(N⁶) to train and O(N²) to run. In layman's terms, 10 times more data means 1,000,000 times more training time and power, and 100 times more time and power to run. This isn't a failure of not "nerding hard enough"; it's built into the very fabric of how the models work and how NVidia builds its chips.
Nobody has O(N²) data center capacity, and nobody can build it.
The proponents are playing the "infinite number of monkeys" game not only with a decidedly finite number of monkeys, but with monkeys that quickly get wildly expensive to keep and which will never solve the problem at hand.
Absolutely correct. The current approach does not scale. Modest, incremental improvements in performance come at phenomenal cost. The brute force approach of the tech bro's simply burns (our) money.
Worst of all, the only thing the monkeys are producing is monkey shit.
While I'm no fan of what's being marketed as 'AI', I am definitely a fan of narrowly-scoped and more cost-effective →expert systems← to solve specific classes of otherwise overwhelming problems (meteor monitoring, folding proteins, brain injury, filtering potential drug molecules, etc.).
AI definitely has good uses but I think overall it’s overhyped.
This kind of sums up Trump's economic policies: disconnected, spurious, misinformed, confused.
Trump has no idea where he's heading. It's not even the case of putting the cart before the horses. It's horses in every direction pulling the cart into a pile of rubble.
FOLLOW ME!!!!
(where we goin'?)
I am very pleased that humanity has progressed far enough that society no longer functions to enhance the stand of living and lifestyle of all of its members, but instead now functions to bend all resources and funnel all wealth into the hands of a few individuals no matter what the cost to everyone else. /s
From China to Europe, and with the Maya and Inca, that was pretty much the serf's life centuries ago. Everything old is new again.
I think it is very important to remember that, during the campaign, Trump openly solicited $1B from the oil companies for his campaign. His aversion to renewable energy may be driven in part by this campaign promise.
The irony for those oil company donors is that Trump's erratic policies are making it unprofitable* to operate a lot of wells, so they're shutting down a lot of rigs and not drilling very many new ones. I only recently learned how much steel pipe is used in drilling wells...and then is left in the ground.
_________
*Not worth it for oil prices under $60/bbl and for many wells not even $65/bbl.
Oh yeah. I lived near oil fields when I was growing up. My father was a welder and crew pusher in the oil fields. There's a huge amount of steel in well drilling.
He is surely going to add tariff loopholes for his favorite cronies?
Only if they bribe him again.
...and don't call me Shirley.
and by the ensuing bribes from the oil companies, not paid in public - perhaps through buying his crypto junk.
His hostility towards wind power is famously known to have been caused by the Scottish government building a wind generation facility within view of one of his golf courses.
Why should I pay for AI and cryptocurrency through my electric bill? I use neither.
It is assumed that you can't *not* pay for AI and cryptocurrency through your electric bill. Very much like NVIDIA and AMD can't *not* pay 15% protection money to keep their China business going.
welcome to the concept of externalities...
We will be putting out a white paper on the topic of the critical mismatch between the expected demand for electricity and supply by 2035. It will be up in a few days. It will be free to download at the FutureMetrics website.
Dominion Power (VA) wants me to pay a surcharge for renewable energy. Even though wind and solar is cheaper. Yes, I know that first we need investment, but isn't that THEIR job that they ought to be doing without begging me to subsidize it? Shouldn't they be doing it anyway?
It’s true, the utilities do the same thing here in Massachusetts. So the people who end up paying are those who actually care about the environment. Others get free ride.
The future is solar or wind powered homes. Trump is a demented retro fossil. Finance your own power plant at home.
We are in the process of getting solar panels in order to qualify for the tax credit that the Republicans have arranged to kill after December 2025. (Installation must be completed by 31 December.) However, solar panels are not a panacea. In our area, we will save the most money during the day in the summer, with lower savings in the spring and fall, with winter being the least. For various reasons, we could not do a storage battery. Solar does not, for most of us allow self-sufficiency, only some cost savings, and it will take about ten years to break even, although perhaps less if electrical costs escalate.
Where we live just north of Baltimore MD, we do still have to purchase power off the grid in the winter. When we put in our solar we also converted to geothermal heating/cooling, so we no longer use oil or straight electricity for that, which also helps the environment and saves money. Good luck getting your system installed before the deadline. Sorry you couldn’t do battery storage. That’s what initially started our search for solar is to have a backup energy source other than wood in a wood stove.
Home solar can never be as cost-effective as sub-grid or grid-scale solar. (And you have to deal with cleaning and replacing if damaged.) That said, upper-income homeowners can afford to pay for the reliability of generators and solar/storage systems in the face of an unreliable grid.
Isn't that being disallowed in some locations? Probably not California, but possibly in pro-petro states/counties?
I live in south central PA. Our electric supplier is a co-op known as Adam’s Electric. We had to jump through a lot of regulatory hoops, but it was worth it. I guess some states do not treat solar suppliers equally, but PA is not one. We do not burn fossil fuels or pollute the environment to produce electricity. In a sane world everyone would be encouraged to do this!
Cryto is a major concern for me. All that enery consumption for nothing other than one more grift for some, laundering money for others. I can do without AI too.
Love the double meaning of your title: “AI Is Power-Hungry”.
"But will we do the sensible thing?" Of course not! Not with tRump in power, the right thingn will never be done. He fights the right thing time and again. The tech bros own him. along with the crypto (because of his own dealings with it to the tune of 2.6 billion in his own pocket in 7 months!). He has no inclination towards helping the middle or lower classes, let them eat cake AND all the higher bills that come with these two monstrosities. Higher and higher our electric bills will go, higher and more inflationary than everything else, All for the benefit of the few...AGAIN. Which in turn is making life barely affordable for the middle class and unaffordable for the lower middle class and the poor already. No folks, until we rise up and take it all back we're fucked by the the right. But hey, I guess this is what we , well, THEY, 77 million fools, voted for.....
Yes. The 77 million are the problem, and they are, unfortunately, not going away. Ever.
but also the issue is the 80 million who did not bother TO vote as well...we need to reach them first
We need to reach the ones who lean D, yes.
I was not aware of the electrical demands. Thank you. It makes green energy more important. Love the Dead coda.
This is actually my entire job. Running models and simulations to inform utilities what they need in 5 years to be able to provide customers with electricity when they want and need it. Looking at projections, we don’t have the physical capacity to install every data center going into the queue. Not enough chips. Globally. It’s very speculative. Data center developers hedging all over the place getting their sites greenlit and then selling that approval to your AI folks. They should bring their own power. Or co-locate. Elon Musk has done this in Memphis. It’s not going well. Asking for profit folks to solve a problem leads to for profit folks not caring about the people near the data centers. They will gladly pay the fine for violating air and water permits. Small price to pay for them. There is a real possibility we are going to run out of capacity but we are going to run out of energy waiting for the gas plants to be built. Renewables are faster to bring online and will provide energy. What is concerning for ratepayers is having to pay for the overbuilds when only a fraction of these data centers get built. Stranded assets still get paid off even if they don’t run.
If AI sucks up all the energy, it is also hard to see how US manufacturing can become competitive again. Btw, food automats still remain popular for some reason in the Netherlands. Not sure what this tells us about the Dutch.
Maybe they are healthier by not consuming so much short-order fried food?
Good Morning, Professor! Tucson, AZ, just turned down an AI Center. Citizens were working overtime to make that refusal happen. Water use and supply played a significant role in that. Could you explore the water needs, also?