Haley Zaremba
Haley Zaremba is a writer and journalist based in Mexico City. She has extensive experience writing and editing environmental features, travel pieces, local news in the…
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By Haley Zaremba – Jul 26, 2024, 6:00 PM CDT
- The rapid growth of artificial intelligence poses significant energy security risks due to its high electricity consumption.
- The U.S. Department of Energy has proposed a new initiative called FASST to harness AI for the public’s benefit while addressing energy challenges and ensuring responsible AI governance.
- FASST aims to advance national security, attract skilled workforce, drive scientific discovery, optimize energy production, and develop expertise for AI governance.
To date, the runaway growth of the Artificial Intelligence agency has proven itself to be all but ungovernable. As the technology has taken over the tech sector like wildfire, regulators have been largely impotent to stay ahead of its spread and evolution. Questions about the reach and responsibility of Artificial Intelligence are being bandied around, but there are few answers to go around. And then there is the issue of the sector’s gargantuan and growing energy footprint and associated carbon emissions, which are now so significant that the developed world is facing a major energy crunch like they haven’t seen since before the shale revolution.
“AI-powered services involve considerably more computer power – and so electricity – than standard online activity, prompting a series of warnings about the technology’s environmental impact,” the BBC recently reported. A recent study from scientists at Cornell University finds that generative AI systems like ChatGPT use up to 33 times more energy than computers running task-specific software, and each AI-powered internet query consumes about ten times more energy than a standard search.
The global AI sector is expected to be responsible for 3.5 percent of global electricity consumption by 2030. In the United States, data centers alone could consume 9 percent of electricity generation by 2030, double their current levels. Already, this development is making major waves for Big Tech – earlier this month Google revealed that its carbon emissions have skyrocketed by 48 percent over the last five years.
Not only does the United States need far more renewable growth to keep up with the insatiable demand of the tech sector, it needs more energy production, period, in order to avoid crippling shortages. Broad and rapid action is needed on several fronts in order to slow the runaway train of AI’s energy consumption, but the United States also needs to keep up with other nations’ AI spending and development for its own national security concerns. The genie is out of the bottle, and it’s not going back in.
“Certain strategic areas of the US government’s artificial intelligence capabilities currently lag industry while foreign adversaries are investing in AI at scale,” a recent Department of Energy (DoE) bulletin read.