AI consumes a lot of energy. According to one researcher, if AI were a country, by the year 2027, it would be about the world’s 35th largest national electricity consumer. But, predictions that AI will wreck the grid and despoil the climate are probably not going to come to pass. Instead, AI energy consumption will probably follow the same trajectory as overall internet-related energy did.
Around the turn of the century, analysts predicted that internet energy consumption would grow to levels that would overwhelm the power grid. That didn’t happen. What did happen is that data center operators and hardware manufacturers improved efficiency, so that even though internet data usage grew immensely, data center energy consumption remained manageable.
