Artificial intelligence offers an enticing array of benefits — but it also requires a growing supply of electricity, potentially straining the nation’s power grid. L&S experts consider how that conundrum is likely to play out.
You probably don’t think much about it, but there’s a lot of power consumed by that ChatGPT query you just executed. According to the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a single query to one of the market’s most popular AI chatbots consumes the electrical equivalent of powering a lightbulb for 20 minutes — more than 10 times the power cost of a simple Google search.
Now consider that experts project the 2,700 AI data centers located in the United States that handle millions of AI queries from users each day will consume six percent of the country’s total electricity by the year 2026, up two full percent from the total percentage consumed in 2022. According to the International Energy Agency, data centers, AI and the cryptocurrency sector sucked up an estimated 460 terawatt hours in 2022, more than a tenth of the overall U.S. electrical consumption that year. With companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft releasing ever more powerful AI tools and looking to build even more data centers to support them, a power problem could be looming.
Read the full article at: https://ls.wisc.edu/news/the-hidden-cost-of-ai