AI's Insatiable Appetite For Energy Threatens Ireland's Grid

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Posted on 11/23/2024 5:13:08 PM PST by SeekAndFind

Ireland is set to become the next country to face a major threat to its power grid due to the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence. Dublin has emerged as the heart of Europe’s data center hub, and hyperscale cloud providers have quickly become a pillar of the country’s economy. But powering the data centers that house the cloud has become a monumental task with the runaway growth of AI.

Artificial intelligence requires a stunning amount of energy to train and power its complex computation systems. Currently, the approximate amount of energy needed to sustain the sector’s growth is doubling every 100 days. At a global level, the AI sector alone could be responsible for 3.5 percent of all energy consumption by 2030 according to expert projections. “When you look at the numbers, it is staggering,” Jason Shaw, chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission, an electricity regulator, told the Washington Post earlier this year. “It makes you scratch your head and wonder how we ended up in this situation. How were the projections that far off? This has created a challenge like we have never seen before.”

Already, the yearly power consumption of AI is more than most entire countries – only 16 nations in the entire world consume more annually. Ireland is a hotspot country – along with Saudi Arabia and Malaysia – where existing energy supplies are simply insufficient to power the data centers currently planned. “The almost overnight surge in electricity demand from data centers is now outstripping the available power supply in many parts of the world,” Bloomberg reported in June.

(Excerpt) Read more at oilprice.com ...

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Ireland is not alone in this dilemma. The United Kingdom is expected to see a 500% increase of energy demand from AI over the next ten years. Sweden, which has a climate ideally suited to naturally cooling data centers, could see related power demand grow two-fold within the decade, followed by another two-fold increase by 2040. The United States, too, is already facing considerable power crunches due to AI expansion. At a global level, the energy consumption by data centers alone is expected to top 1,580 TWh – around the equivalent of the entire country of India, the most populated nation on Earth.

1 posted on 11/23/2024 5:13:08 PM PST by SeekAndFind

To: SeekAndFind

2 posted on 11/23/2024 5:15:20 PM PST by ClearCase_guy (My decisions about people are based almost entirely on skin color. I learned this from Democrats.)

To: SeekAndFind

3 posted on 11/23/2024 5:19:37 PM PST by ChuckHam

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