Artificial Intelligence, Power Demand, and the Risks of Nuclear Weapons: a View from Networked Systems Research and the Goldman Sachs Perspective

generative artificialintelligence is so powerful online that you can’t ignore it. An AI-generated summary may randomly appear at the top of the results whenever you do a Google search. Meta might say that you should try their tool while browsing Facebook. And that ever-present sparkle emoji continues to haunt my dreams.

Goldman Sachs has researched the expected growth of data centers in the U.S. and estimates they’ll be using 8% of total power in the country by 2030, up from 3% in 2022. Company analysts say “the proliferation of AI technology, and the data centers necessary to feed it” will drive a surge in power demand “the likes of which hasn’t been seen in a generation.”

Junchen Jiang, a networked systems researcher at the University of Chicago, believes that the energy usage and carbon footprint of data centers is proportional to the amount of computation they do. The bigger the AI model, the more computation is often required, and these frontier models are getting absolutely gigantic.

There is a lot of discussion about the risks of Artificial Intelligence and how it could possibly lead to the control of nuclear weapons. “That’s not the real existential risk. Right now, we have an emotional crisis. Climate change is being made worse by artificial intelligence.

Google is an “ai-first” tech company: Energy consumption and emissions increase by 48% since last year, according to a new Google Sustainability Report

Google said it spent $12 billion on capital expenditures just that quarter, which was “driven overwhelmingly” by investments in data centers to fuel its AI endeavors. The company said it expects to keep up that same level of spending throughout the year.

All major tech companies are going full throttle on AI. According to the CEO,google is an “ai-first” company. Over the last few months, the company released its Gemini chatbot to the world and added its A.I. Overview tool to Google Search. Meta has added a number of products to its portfolio. And Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI last month to bring AI to its Siri digital assistant.

There are more than 7,000 data centers in the world. That’s up from 3,600 in 2015. When combined, Bloomberg estimates these data centers consume the equivalent amount of electricity per year as the entire country of Italy.

The Washington Post reports that the plans to decommission several coal plants have been delayed because of the intense thirst for electricity in the country.

“The infrastructure and electricity needed for these technologies create new challenges for meeting sustainability commitments across the tech sector,” the report reads.

“One query to ChatGPT uses approximately as much electricity as could light one light bulb for about 20 minutes,” he says. It adds up to a really large amount of electricity, with the millions of people using that every day.

OpenAI does not reveal their emissions, which is why they work on artificial intelligence. But, last week, Google released a new sustainability report with a glimpse at this data. Deep within the 86-page report, Google said its greenhouse gas emissions rose last year by 48% since 2019. The surge in energy consumption and emissions was attributed to the data center.

The report stated that they were no longer maintaining carbon neutrality. The company says it’s still pushing for its net-zero goal in 2030.