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Possibleidiot01 on Mar 25, 2024 10:08am
Megatrend - Morning Brew
 Amazon data centers in Virginia. Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images AI data centers are sprouting up across the United States at a rate not seen since fro-yo took over strip malls in the 2000s. And their staggering growth is causing alarm that the country’s power grid doesn’t have the electricity capacity to absorb them without breaking.
At a major energy conference in Houston last week, the No. 1 agenda item—of all things—was artificial intelligence, with leaders including Bill Gates warning that the top constraint to AI development was finding sufficient power sources to feed data centers.
How we got here Over the past few decades, US demand for electricity has been pretty flat. But the horizontal chart went fully vertical as the excitement around AI set off a land grab for data centers, which are massive buildings housing the computing infrastructure that trains large-language models, like the one behind ChatGPT.
- Earlier this month, Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison boasted that he’s building an AI data center that could fit eight Boeing 747s nose to tail.
The power problem: Airplane hangar-sized data centers training AI systems require “exponentially more power” than traditional data centers, per the Washington Post, causing utilities to dramatically upgrade their demand projections.
- Oregon’s Portland General Electric just doubled its forecast for new electricity demand in the next five years.
- Georgia now predicts 17x more demand for industrial power than recent estimates. “This has created a challenge like we have never seen before,” the chairman of Georgia’s electricity regulator told the WaPo.
It’s not just data centers straining the grid. The US is experiencing a historic explosion of factory investment as a result of the Biden administration’s manufacturing subsidies, gobbling up power supplies. Crypto mining, too, is taxing the US’s aging power grid.
Big picture: As tech giants like Amazon and Meta scour the US for cheap and plentiful electricity, many worry it could come at the expense of climate change goals. States concerned about meeting demand have proposed dozens of new gas-fired power plants to feed data centers’ insatiable appetite for electricity.—NF | |
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