Tech Revolution or Nature’s Nightmare? Computing the environmental costs of AI
The rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) investment is a double-edged sword. While it promises unprecedented advancements, the environmental cost of AI’s insatiable hunger for energy is reaching a tipping point. Investment in AI has driven Big Tech share prices to fresh highs, creating the idea that AI-focused companies will grow indefinitely.
Meanwhile, investment in data centres, the lifeblood of AI operations, were estimated to attract about US$350 billion in investments in 2023 and that number is projected to balloon to $1 trillion annually by 2027. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has even called for an immediate $5 trillion investment, representing five per cent of global GDP, to fuel further AI development. Jensen Huang, CEO of AI chipmaker NVIDIA, anticipates that corporations could spend $1 trillion over the next four years to upgrade and expand data centre infrastructure to meet the growing demand from AI across sectors.
Data centres devour energy
Large data centres, the backbone of AI operations and a core component of training and operating AI models such as Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s GPT-4, allocate roughly 45 per cent of their energy consumption for cooling purposes. The huge energy demand is increasingly straining power grids, particularly in the…
