How the AI boom and dark data are eating up our energy supply

RICHARD GODWIN investigates the environmental costs of the dizzying rise of artificial intelligence

- RICHARD GODWIN

Last October, Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic, published an online pamphlet entitled Machines of Loving Grace. It’s pretty dizzying stuff. He predicts that “powerful AI” will speed up progress in biology by “10x” or even “100x”, meaning we’ll see centuries of advances in mere decades.

He foresees humans being able to live until 150 by the century’s end, and also dropped in the prospect of existential cyberwars, which would see liberal democracies fight with authoritarian regimes over control of this God-like technology.

Still, when he was interviewed by the BBC’s Amol Rajan from the AI Action summit in Paris last week, Amodei struck a more humdrum note. When Rajan pressed him on what role an unfashionable, liberal democracy like Britain might play in this future, Amodei’s answer was bracingly prosaic. “Energy and data centres,” he said. “It requires a large amount of energy to train and serve the models.”

It’s a little deflating, isn’t it? We wanted robots to do our laundry. What we will get is vast warehouses of polluting computer servers.

For here is the material reality of the current boom. Large-language models such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini need physical infrastructure: microchips, servers, fibre-optic cables and data centres, which are the ultimate destination of all those discarded selfies, unnecessarily CC’d emails and Dall-E artworks.

Data centres already consume 460 terawatt hours of electricity per year, or 1.3 per cent of the world’s entire supply — about as much as France — and the International Energy Agency predicts this will more than double by 2026. This is how the tech sector came to be a greater carbon-emitter than the aviation industry.