CafeNervosa
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Sauce: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/openais-colossal-ai-data-center-targets-would-consume-as-much-electricity-as-entire-nation-of-india-250gw-target-would-require-30-million-gpus-annually-to-ensure-continuous-operation-emit-twice-as-much-carbon-dioxide-as-exxonmobil
TheInternetNeedsMoreCats
Gross
taurondir
... then stop rendering AI girls you horny waifu chasing perverts
NVGoddesscottage
Cats… bring feral cats to relocate to the center. They sleep on the equipment and stop up the works.
TomahawkJackson
Counterpoint: Current US total Electricity Demand is 4,200,000 GW. (4,200 TERAwatt/hours, but I'm keeping Gigawatt/hours to keep the same unit as the article above)
The HIGHEST estimation for AI Datacenters is an additional 1,000,000 GW (of which this article about OpenAI is talking about 250 of 1 MILLION GW or 0.0025% ) Keep in mind that China built 1,400,000 GW of RENEWABLES in the last 5 years.
https://weightythoughts.com/p/no-ai-power-requirements-arent-intractable
Degarafarat
So when do we get to those human pod farms from Matrix to power them?
graehall
JimmyWalkerTexasRanger
I hope we get The Terminator before The Matrix.
https://media1.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPWE1NzM3M2U1anphcXozY21reGM5eDRyZXh5cTJxN3hvdGFqdmd4eDAxMHVpMmE2MiZlcD12MV9naWZzX3NlYXJjaCZjdD1n/e7QO18qopbd99evxyD/200w.gif
arvinj1
Have none of these people ever watched the Terminator movies? Shut it the fuck down!
putcleverusernamehere
I feel like us little people feeling guilty about making a funny picture, or writing a paragraph, and admonishing each other here to not use AI, is akin to telling people it'll make a difference eliminating plastic straws. Does it technically? Sure. Does it meaningfully? Absolutely not. Industries are using AI for complex tasks. Doctors are using AI to second guess themselves while searching for diagnoses..1/2..
putcleverusernamehere
..2/2..You can be certain the the US miliary alone used more computing power during the time It took me to type this, than all Imgur users combined have used this year. The list of massive users is endless. I certainly don't have an answer, but I'm certain AI isn't going away no matter what we do. In fact, it's going to increase exponentially, there's no stopping it. We're going to have to figure out how to not kill ourselves with it.
scootwhoman
We need Artificial Intelligence because people are getting dumber.
Madringo
The speed at which AI has started to decimate jobs is phenomenal. Microsoft replaced 15,000 people with AI. The Canadian government just launched its budget address and said it would replace 4000 workers with AI. I could go on and on. The only people who are truly benefiting from AI are the richest of the rich. Contemplating alternative energy and nitpicking the details of the energy consumption is the last thing you should be considering. Look up your job and see if AI can replace you.
Dogstar23
Recording on water - https://youtu.be/pMEtcnstu9o
sadurdaynight
Sam Altman is asking for safety nets for OpenAI investments.. that instills confidence that the company is not grossly overvalued and a house of cards waiting to collapse. It's like how someone that thinks they're committing crime is pre-emptively asking for a pardon.
beaubrent
Who pays for this? Us.
leviaton
If you don't help build it then it will find and kill you
ExplodingPortaPotty
I mean there is no FIXING global warming anymore. The deadline for that has come and gone. All that can be done now is mitigate how devastating the eventual catastrophes will be.
cousteau
Yeah we're screwed, but there's still margin for getting screwed harder!
JacobsJ52
I mean, hasn't it already been said that humanity has already signed its own death warrant? There's no going back for us. The planet will survive. Nature will survive, but humanity has already destroyed its chance of existing.
Hyzenthlay021
Yeah, but can it get hands and feet right? The world demands answers!
PileOfWalthers
Yeah the hands and feet issue is so last year.
IhopeyougetstageIIIcoloncancer
For reference, since India is a poor comparison given its level of technological development is hard to gauge: 250 GW is about the total power consumption of the entirety of Tokyo.
cousteau
For other reference: Texas, Florida, and California combined use less than half as much electric power (yearly average).
pr0t34n
it's simple, build the data centers and then ask AI how to fix global warming. you know, 'put glue on pizza' but for the whole planet! easy!
givemepickles
The answer: eliminate the humans.
Duh.
Then it’ll have no need to care about the environment left.
DdCno1
Sci-fi story idea: AI realizes this, but since humans would recoil at the idea, it'll instead propose a series of seemingly reasonable measures that ultimately lead to human extinction.
AlmostClever
Frothington
Do you want humanity to be put in a mulcher? This is how you get humanity put in a mulcher.
rubypilgrim
and do we really need it?
JackieTreehornProductions
it's counterproductive as it is - a net lose lose. The information AI regurgitates is full of errors and using it to "increase efficiency" is simply inserting it to process information and ship it off with no human intervention only to have the results read by another AI and summarize the mistaken info for a human to then clean up and re-run. It's like walking the roped queue for a ride with nobody else in line when you could have just walked directly to the front.
AndersCalrissian
Put them in orbit with solar powered generation connected by fiber cables to the Earth. You can cut the cables if they turn bad.
invaderjak
boil the oceans to draw a meme
DukeDarkwood
"Burn the land, boil the seas. You can't take the memes from me." Wait, what.
TheWombatStrikesAgain
And not even a good one.
filurilurl
"yes, we boiled the oceans, for a brief moment in time, we created a lot of shareholder value" (not on my main PC, can't post or credit the original comic)
RevolutionOnHerLips
You leave my eight-fingered sexbot girlfriend out of this! /s
invaderjak
I recently heard "finglers" as a word for what AI does to hands and I love it.
tentacularfleshscape
Flickering digital billboard of Garfield holding an AK 47, fitfully lightning a blasted mad maxian wasteland
WackyWavingFlailingArmTubeMan
Okay so call me an optimist but maybe this absolute lunacy of energy requirements will spark some interest for say thorium nuclear reactors that produce fuck tons of energy wouldn't need as much infrastructure, can pretty much be put anywhere thats not DIRECTLY on a fault line (looking at you japan) and is practically carbon neutral and maybe even tax write offs for companies building the data centers
Khanamana324
Fingers crossed.
Filanwizard
the smart thing for world governments would be to mandate power use and water use limits on data centers. This would force the AI industry to make its compute more power efficient, and DCs to figure out how to waste less water. Also ban DCs from using potable water for their cooling towers, Cooling the condensers of the HVAC system does not need clean water. the water usage is because they evaporate it to cool the condensers of the air conditioning system.
mithiwithi
They will, no doubt, complain that using gray water or other unpurified sources is more expensive. Which it is, because they have to clean out the contaminants left behind by evaporation. But tough toenails. Pay the costs you impose on society or gtfo.
0RumRunner
Was talking with my mom the other day, and she had no idea AI data centers were consuming so many resources. I'm slowly putting together a collection of creditable articles to share with her. Please share if you've got them.
CylensTheDiscourse
Why does that matter? To make your mom even more scared of the world than she already is?
gesel
Data center electrical usage is about 1.5% of global total, it is electrified and the cheapest greenfield energy source is solar. Exxon emits very little CO₂, exxon's customers emit a lot burning their product. https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from-ai
If the truthdig estimate is correct, 250GW = 2,190 TWh/yr, more than India 1,957 TWh and 7.4% of global total of 29,664, which would be an issue.
Their water alarmism is discrediting.
ThankYouForYourTime
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DGjj7wDYaiI this is about doc about people who live next to AI data centers and it has ruined their QoL
LostCaterpillar
Where's Your Ed At is probably not the source you want to send her directly but he sites his sources pretty extensively so it's a good place to harvest links from. Plus he's just a fun read if you enjoy somebody meticulously taking the AI hype apart in excruciating detail.
https://www.wheresyoured.at
IBroughtASpareDrainpipe
This is the article she really needs - 90% of AI projects are failing! See https://archive.ph/RnRDz
TomahawkJackson
Add this one to provide a well rounded viewpoint from a variety of Smart People:
And don't forget that 1 Terawatt/hour is 1,000 Gigawatt hours... So we're talking about a US total electricity demand of 1,400,000 Gigawatt/hours, and the article is talking about an additional 250 Gigawatt/hours of demand... or 0.025% increase.
...and China has added, 1,400,000 GW/h of RENEWABLES in the last 5 years.
https://weightythoughts.com/p/no-ai-power-requirements-arent-intractable
gesel
They said GW, which is meaningful on a global scale, and more than india (.25×24×365=2,190 TWh). If they meant GWh, which is how such consumption is usually measured and what we pay for (we buy energy, joules, not power, watts) - then the whole thing is as innumerate rage bait as getting exercised over $50k/day in desal water, and while 0.25 TWh is still a lot of energy, as much as Grenada, it is only 0.0008% of global consumption. @ $0.20/kWh = $50m/yr.
gesel
0.25 TWh/$50m/yr seems awfully low but 2190 TWh = $500B/yr in electricity alone. The total market for AI by 2031 is $1T, even if that's retail rather than whole supply chain, $500B COGS is insanely lossy, especially given estimates that 60% of AI COGS is silicon. The numbers seem off.
moonshadowkati
India consumes 440GW of electricity per year, which is very low for their size; America consumes 3 times that much with only 20% the population size. The carbon dioxide estimate appears to be unsourced and unexplained. Other than that, fair warning.
givemepickles
Thanks. But.
just because the scale isn’t to American scale, still doesn’t mean it isn’t depressing or massive or a problem. Still a problem that a *single business* would be consuming as much energy as *any nation*.
Not to mention the fact that this business model will be inevitably replicated across all their competitors. So you know, if the environment wasn’t already fucked…
CylensTheDiscourse
It isn't a massive problem when it's still in single percentage of impact overall. Nearly every major business would use as much as a nation. For example, there are 23 countries that use less energy than gaming PCs in the US alone generate, yet I don't see some massive pushback against people using gaming PCs.
MoonPieTown
The International Energy Agency (IEA) says that the CO2 emissions from data centers made up for 1% of total CO2 emissions worldwide in 2023. 2026 it's expected to be around 2% but that's not final yet.
Worth keeping an eye on and legislating, but also people are definitely throwing a lot of unsourced claims out there of bigger impacts.
ttps://www.iea.org/energy-system/buildings/data-centres-and-data-transmission-networks
RhinoNaut
GW is usually used to describe capacity. Annual consumption is usually measured in TWH. Their installed capacity is 475 GW and yearly production was 1824 TWH in the last fiscal year. Google says India's peak power demand was 250 GW in 2025
moonshadowkati
Thanks, my usage of terminology was off and I should be corrected for that. That's part of the problem with the message here: it's not an apples to apples comparison. Capacity is compared to usage.
cousteau
1,824,000 GWh ÷ 366 days ÷ 24 h/day = 207.65 GW (average power during the year). Which as expected is less than the total installed power in the country (maximum possible power production) because that never works at 100%, gotta have some margin of operation.
As for the datacenter capacity vs consumption, the link does say the cards run 24/7/365, so they'll be running at full capacity all time… right?
moonshadowkati
Hmm, makes sense. Guess I fucked up.
blaghart
>would emit< only if you continue using goal and natural gas power plants. That's the thing, the issue here isn't AI, it isn't how much power AI consumes. The issue is that our power generation infrastructure, globally, is horrifically toxic AND inefficient due to being outdated. If we were running the whole planet on nuclear power plants this wouldn't even be noteworthy except as a "wow look at how much power we can generate!" headline
cousteau
Nuclear has some issues too - limited resources, less flexibility / ability to turn plants on and off (not really an issue for feeding datacenters that are on 24/7), potential risks, and also the issue of what to do with the waste (which fossil fuels solved as "pump it into the atmosphere and screw the whole planet forever" so in that regard it's still an improvement)
EleganceIsDead
Thorium & Fusion reactors, Geothermal, Wind, & especially Solar. If it weren't for the Petrochemical Industry directly oppressing & suppressing new technologies & innovations (a perfect example being doucheweasel Reagan taking Cater's Solar panels off the Whitehouse), we'd have been off the oil addiction decades ago. Fuckin Hemp fiber could entirely eliminate the need for Petrochermical plastic fibers. We just need to upgrade our power sources, BEFORE we Easy Bake Oven ourselves into extinction.
androgenoide
Isn't that something like the caloric energy consumption of over 2 billion people? How many workers is the AI supposed to replace?
cousteau
It'd be more fair to compare it to the total energy consumption associated to a human (electricity, hot water, etc) since we humans need those to survive as well.
androgenoide
Sure and we could add in the total energy budget including sunlight required to grow the crops needed to create those calories. Lets be generous and call it 20 million people instead of 2 billion. It's still a good question.
cousteau
Indeed. I did the math with average energy consumption (electric or not) per human being 20 MWh/year (world average) and the number is actually about 100 million. It does beg the question of how much energy we're saving by delegating on machines, if at all (and if it's worth it because holy shit, the results are atrocious)
androgenoide
Well, if climate change and resource depletion reduce the human population to one billion we may need millions of AI slaves to maintain our consumerist lifestyle.
taez555
To think it only takes 1.21GW to travel in time.
LateNightBunnyParty
Literally watching this movie right now. That Biff is a real nogoodnik.
HypnagogicHallucinations
1.21 Jiggawatts?!
dudbdjf
What the hell’s jiggawatt??
YoureTooTents
What the jigg is a hellawatt?
BeaverOnFire
MuffinProof
Nothing, what the hell's a jiggawatt with you?
denimdaddy
My local brewery has a beer called 1.21 giggagops. It's pretty good if you enjoy IPA
Toqom
But who really enjoys things that taste like bitter piss? Honestly it's an acquired taste, beer is gross, men just get used to it and pretend.
AlmostClever
I would like to consume this particular fermented potable.
mcneelyj
Brewery name?
BananaForScaIe
gopsamillion
WigglyBlondeNoodle
I wish I liked IPAs because they always seem to get the coolest names.