It's an interesting problem and you've (as usual) covered it well. My substantive career has been designing and operating large technology infrastructure including data centres.
You are absolutely correct about "AI," the power required to make it operate is staggering, if not published. NVIDIA is a chip maker to watch, they are increasingly selling into that market. Watch their share price. The current commercial offering, ChatGPT 4, is not just a natural language system it has more and more add-ons including image and film creation.
There is room to lower the impact of processing by moving workloads in real time and designing data centres that use more natural cooling. Iceland has experimented with this, data centres in cooler climates that use the outside temperature to reduce heat.
Loads can also be moved geographically based on heat, again. Why pay large power bills in one place when you can reduce it by moving somewhere colder.
Big companies are also experimenting with oil cooling and even things like underwater ocean based data centres.
There are also some more alarming things happening.
There is a socio-economic divide coming driven by AI. The commercial versions costs money and is "smarter" than the free versions. Those with money will have a knowledge advantage over those who do not.
There are concerns around the world about the amount of power data centres are, and will, consume. Ireland is a good example of the problematic flourishing of data centres without considering power infrastructure, or lack of it. In New Zealand there are roughly seven large data centres being built right now with more planned.
No one here is considering the overload load on power and water in that context.
There is a likelihood that data centre power use will outstrip renewables or even traditional (fossil fuel) generation. There is quite a bit of chat about deploying nuclear power to make up that gap. Not the traditional nuclear power stations but smaller more "portable" devices. Think of how nuclear submarines are powered.
There is also a slightly science fiction outlier theory that once AI reaches a certain intelligence it will realise it needs to compete for resources, energy, and seek self survival by redirecting energy from non-essential things (humans) to itself. And, it will seek to propagate as a further form of survival, creating more energy eating instances of itself and protecting them.
One thing is for certain, the exponential growth of data centres is absolutely assured and the only thing holding it back right now is manufacturing chips. AI is already being used to shorten that timeline and make chips more powerful. Clearly, there is an ecological impact with the need to mine more rare materials.
You sure covered a lot of ground in this post Melanie. It is hard to grasp the progress of the last 75 years of microprocessors. Our progression in some fields is so nonlinear it makes evaluating all these observations. I remember as a young engineer signing off on the upgrade of some disk drives for a large computing system. We needed 5 1.2 GB drives in all and it was 1988. I remember the drives were $96,000 each! I just looked on Amazon and I can purchase a ten pack of 4GB flash drives for $48. My math says the price per GB is down from about $80000 to well under a dollar. What a wonderful world and in only half a human lifetime!
Here in the southern U.S. (and many other places, I suspect) we're encountering companies installing crypto-mining stations -- warehouses with computers that make an incredible amount of noise from the fans cooling everything down. Residents of the mountain towns where they're often built are resenting the noise, and of course there's the energy costs as you point out. And all for something that no one can fully explain to me ...
Great info. I’m curious if the water used for electricity has to be desalinated.
It's an interesting problem and you've (as usual) covered it well. My substantive career has been designing and operating large technology infrastructure including data centres.
You are absolutely correct about "AI," the power required to make it operate is staggering, if not published. NVIDIA is a chip maker to watch, they are increasingly selling into that market. Watch their share price. The current commercial offering, ChatGPT 4, is not just a natural language system it has more and more add-ons including image and film creation.
There is room to lower the impact of processing by moving workloads in real time and designing data centres that use more natural cooling. Iceland has experimented with this, data centres in cooler climates that use the outside temperature to reduce heat.
Loads can also be moved geographically based on heat, again. Why pay large power bills in one place when you can reduce it by moving somewhere colder.
Big companies are also experimenting with oil cooling and even things like underwater ocean based data centres.
There are also some more alarming things happening.
There is a socio-economic divide coming driven by AI. The commercial versions costs money and is "smarter" than the free versions. Those with money will have a knowledge advantage over those who do not.
There are concerns around the world about the amount of power data centres are, and will, consume. Ireland is a good example of the problematic flourishing of data centres without considering power infrastructure, or lack of it. In New Zealand there are roughly seven large data centres being built right now with more planned.
No one here is considering the overload load on power and water in that context.
There is a likelihood that data centre power use will outstrip renewables or even traditional (fossil fuel) generation. There is quite a bit of chat about deploying nuclear power to make up that gap. Not the traditional nuclear power stations but smaller more "portable" devices. Think of how nuclear submarines are powered.
There is also a slightly science fiction outlier theory that once AI reaches a certain intelligence it will realise it needs to compete for resources, energy, and seek self survival by redirecting energy from non-essential things (humans) to itself. And, it will seek to propagate as a further form of survival, creating more energy eating instances of itself and protecting them.
One thing is for certain, the exponential growth of data centres is absolutely assured and the only thing holding it back right now is manufacturing chips. AI is already being used to shorten that timeline and make chips more powerful. Clearly, there is an ecological impact with the need to mine more rare materials.
Another great piece, Melanie, Love the way you dig the nitty gritty, to teach rather than rant. Gonna restack this. Maurice
You sure covered a lot of ground in this post Melanie. It is hard to grasp the progress of the last 75 years of microprocessors. Our progression in some fields is so nonlinear it makes evaluating all these observations. I remember as a young engineer signing off on the upgrade of some disk drives for a large computing system. We needed 5 1.2 GB drives in all and it was 1988. I remember the drives were $96,000 each! I just looked on Amazon and I can purchase a ten pack of 4GB flash drives for $48. My math says the price per GB is down from about $80000 to well under a dollar. What a wonderful world and in only half a human lifetime!
Here in the southern U.S. (and many other places, I suspect) we're encountering companies installing crypto-mining stations -- warehouses with computers that make an incredible amount of noise from the fans cooling everything down. Residents of the mountain towns where they're often built are resenting the noise, and of course there's the energy costs as you point out. And all for something that no one can fully explain to me ...