What will power AI’s growth?

As I discovered while I continued that line of reporting, building new nuclear plants isn’t so simple or so fast. And as my colleague David Rotman lays out in his story for the package, the AI boom could wind up relying on another energy source: fossil fuels. So what’s going to power AI? Let’s get into it. When we started talking about this big project on AI and energy demand, we had a lot of conversations about what to include. And from the beginning, the climate team was really focused on examining what, exactly, was going to be providing the electricity needed to run data centers powering AI models. As we wrote in the main story: “A data center humming away isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If all data centers were hooked up to solar panels and ran only when the sun was shining, the world would be talking a lot less about AI’s energy consumption.” But a lot of AI data centers need to be available constantly. Those that are used to train models can arguably be more responsive to the ... Read full article.