Is artificial intelligence a friend or foe?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems need to be powered.

- Arthur Mutambara

With or against us: AI can enhance the efficacy of various clean energy sources such as solar, wind, geothermal, biofuels and hydroelectric power.

They require compute resources, comprising hardware and infrastructure components primarily Central Processing Units (CPUs), Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), Neural Processing Units (NPUs), memory, storage and networking that provide the processing power, data handling and parallel-computation capabilities required to train, run and scale AI models and other intensive workloads.

These compute resources require energy-hungry data centres and AI factories.

A data centre is a physical facility that houses IT infrastructure, such as servers and storage, to manage, process and store data. An AI Factory (which leverages data centres) is designed to develop, train and deploy AI models at scale, focusing on computational resources and AI workflows.

The power requirements of data centres and AI factories are at the gigawatt level. For example, a typical AI factory's energy requirement is 2 GW (2000 MW), equivalent to that of a city like San Francisco or a country like Zimbabwe.

Furthermore, there is a demand for large volumes of fresh water for cooling (to prevent hardware overheating), putting pressure on the available water supply for human consumption, agriculture and other industrial purposes.

Hence, the large carbon footprint of AI systems primarily stems from the significant compute resources required for energy-intensive tasks such as training and deploying Large Language Models (LLMs).

These tasks require high-performance hardware, such as GPUs and TPUs, which consume substantial electricity.