Yes, AI will need a lot of energy, but most of it will be renewables, and in the long-term it will more than pay off
Speaking at a conference in London on Friday, Bill Gates urged environmentalists and governments “not to go overboard” about the significant power needed to operate new generative AI systems.
Developing a technology that requires enormous processing capacity supported by increasingly large data centers will require a sharp increase in electricity use, which some compare to the total consumption of a small but heavily industrialized country such as the Netherlands. Microsoft recognizes that the development of generative artificial intelligence and its incorporation into practically all kinds of features in its products has led to a 30% increase in its total electricity consumption, forcing it to delay its carbon footprint reduction targets.
Older readers will remember alarmist media reports more than two decades ago of the increase in electricity consumption required by all those Google queries; the estimates turned out not only to be wrong, but failed to take into account the huge energy savings created by the availability of information at our fingertips. Can we imagine what our lives would have been like without search engines like Google, and the energy we would have consumed if we had to go and look for all that…
