3. AI is power hungry and getting hungrier.
You’ve probably heard that AI is power hungry. But a lot of that reputation comes from the amount of electricity it takes to train these giant models, though giant models only get trained every so often.
What’s changed is that these models are now being used by hundreds of millions of people every day. And while using a model takes far less energy than training one, the energy costs ramp up massively with those kinds of user numbers.
ChatGPT, for example, has 400 million weekly users. That makes it the fifth-most-visited website in the world, just after Instagram and ahead of X. Other chatbots are catching up.
So it’s no surprise that tech companies are racing to build new data centers in the desert and revamp power grids.
The truth is we’ve been in the dark about exactly how much energy it takes to fuel this boom because none of the major companies building this technology have shared much information about it.
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