Is AI the Next Big Climate-Change Threat? We Haven’t a Clue

As a recent conference in San Francisco, Gary Dickerson took the stage and made a bold prediction. The chief executive of Applied Materials, which is a big supplier to the semiconductor industry, warned that in the absence of significant innovation in materials, chip manufacturing and design, data centers’ AI workloads could account for a tenth of the world’s electricity usage by 2025.

A general view in the CERN Computer/Data Centre
and server farm of the 1450 m2 main room during
 a behind the scenes tour at CERN, the world’s
 largest particle physics laboratory, on April 19, 2017
in Meyrin, Switzerland. 

Today, the millions of data centers around the world soak up a little less than 2% — and that statistic encompasses all kinds of workloads handled on their vast arrays of servers. Applied Materials estimates that servers running AI currently account for just 0.1% of global electricity consumption.

Other tech executives are sounding an alarm too. Anders Andrae of Huawei thinks data centers could end up consuming a tenth of the globe’s electricity by 2025, though his estimate covers all their uses, not just AI.

Read the story from MIT Technology Review by Martin Giles - “Is AI the Next Big Climate-Change Threat? We Haven’t a Clue.”