Could the electricity needed to power artificial intelligence make climate change even worse?
The federal government committed $2.4 billion to building artificial intelligence projects in Canada in the latest budget, on top of billions of dollars in federal funding and a national AI strategy in recent years.
Canada's Competition Bureau said in a March discussion paper that AI in Canada is “rapidly evolving,” raising questions about how best to ensure competitiveness and foster innovation in an evolving environment. It pointed out.
At the same time, a report from the International Energy Agency earlier this year warned that “power consumption by data centers, artificial intelligence (AI), and the cryptocurrency sector could double by 2026.”
According to the report, the AI industry in 2026 is “expected to grow exponentially and consume at least 10 times the demand by 2023.”
Alex de Vries, a PhD candidate focusing on the environmental impact of emerging technologies at the Dutch university Amsterdam VU, says the electricity required by AI will result in more greenhouse gas emissions. states that it is possible.
“The only thing I see as a result of this increased energy demand is typically going to lead to increased use of fossil fuels, which will ultimately drive climate change,” he said. told Global News.
Consumption of data centers that can house servers used for AI and cryptocurrency mining operations could increase from 460 TWh in 2022 to an estimated 1,000 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2026.
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Microsoft announced late last year that it was spending hundreds of millions of dollars to expand its cloud computing and AI infrastructure in Quebec, which has been in place since 2017 and is “artificial intelligence (AI) and “Basic research on machine learning” is being conducted.
The IEA report states that the increase in electricity demand in 2026 will be “roughly equivalent to Japan's electricity consumption.”
The report cites research by de Vries that requests from Microsoft's OpenAI ChatGPT consume nearly 10 times more energy than the average Google search.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in January that harnessing AI requires breakthroughs in energy.
“It gives us an incentive to invest more in fusion,” he told the World Economic Forum, adding that he also cited cheaper solar power and energy storage.
The IEA report states that clean energy supplies are “projected to meet all growth in global demand by 2026”, with Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Google all investing in dozens of renewable energy sources. Investing billions of dollars.
But de Vries is less optimistic that companies and countries will be able to convert their power grids to renewable energy so quickly.
“The supply (of renewable energy) is limited,” he said in Almere, Netherlands.
“So if you decide to bring this (electricity) into your data center, which is a growing area, that means you have to power it with fossil fuels somewhere else.”
He suggested that global news companies are racing to build better AI models and need to devote more resources to doing so, but finding enough power will be an impediment to progress.
He also compared AI to other technologies that have generated enthusiasm but limited application, such as blockchain and virtual reality, saying that AI will not be the “miracle cure” that its proponents suggest. He also said that he suspected that.
Either way, countries and companies need to find ways to offset or stop emissions, he said, or tomorrow's technology will exacerbate today's big challenges.
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