LONDON (Yahoo News) - Artificial intelligence is expected to have the most impact on practically everything since the advent of the internet. Wall Street sure thinks so. The tech-heavy Nasdaq is up 26% year to date thanks to the frenzy over AI-related stocks.
But AI’s big breakout comes at a cost: much more energy.
Take for example OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT. Research from the University of Washington shows that hundreds of millions of queries on ChatGPT can cost around 1 gigawatt-hour a day, or the equivalent of the energy consumption of 33,000 U.S. households.
“The energy consumption of something like ChatGPT inquiry compared to some inquiry on your email, for example, is going to [be] probably 10 to 100 times more power hungry,” Sajjad Moazeni, professor of electrical and computer engineering at UW, told Yahoo Finance.
Industry participants say this is only the very beginning of what’s to come.
Data centers are the heart of the advanced computing process. They are the physical locations with thousands of processing units and servers at the core of the cloud computing industry largely managed by Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.
Data centers have increasingly shifted from using simpler processors, called CPUs, to more advanced graphics processing units, or GPUs. Those components, made by companies like Nvidia (NVDA), are the most energy intensive.
“For the next decade, GPUs are going to be the core of AI infrastructure. And GPUs consume 10 to 15 times the amount of power per processing cycle than CPUs do. They’re very energy intensive,” explained Patrick Ward, vice president of marketing for Formula Monks, an AI technology consulting company.
Research done by Benjamin C. Lee, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Pennsylvania, and professor David Brooks of Harvard showed that data center energy usage grew 25% a year on average between 2015 and 2021. This was before generative AI grabbed national headlines and ChatGPT usage skyrocketed.
Meanwhile, U.S. Energy Information Administration data revealed an annual growth rate in renewable deployment of 7% during the same period, though that number is expected to increase with initiatives like the Inflation Reduction Act.