LAW’s All Things Nuclear #768, Wednesday, (10/02/2024)
LAW’s All Things Nuclear #768, Wednesday, (10/02/2024)
“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity”
An AI bank of electronic equipment. (See the article for photo credits.)
LLAW’s NUCLEAR VIEWS, ISSUES & COMMENTS, Wednesday, (10/02/2024)
The following article is just about a year old, discovered while considering another current AI article from Scientific American (that I may post here tomorrow), but it is an important discussion in current news concerning the relatively new relationship between the incredibly spooky AI (Artificial Intelligence) world and the coming demand for nuclear energy by AI servers and their developers and operational users. The Microsoft plan to seek the recommission of the Three Mile Island undamaged unit (TMI 1) that has been shut down since 1979 is a hint of what might be a clue to the electrical power required to manage the future of of AI.
Most of us know very little about AI today, and this article recognizes that issue, and relates the the then future problem to a right-around-the-corner from a year ago to a huge issue that should be alarming us right about now relative to the entire issue of AI, including how it affects our planet Earth’s man-made environmental issues, which are immense. ~llaw
October 13, 2023
The AI Boom Could Use a Shocking Amount of Electricity
Powering artificial intelligence models takes a lot of energy. A new analysis demonstrates just how big the problem could become
Energy
Every online interaction relies on a scaffolding of information stored in remote servers—and those machines, stacked together in data centers worldwide, require a lot of energy. Around the globe, data centers currently account for about 1 to 1.5 percent of global electricity use, according to the International Energy Agency. And the world’s still-exploding boom in artificial intelligence could drive that number up a lot—and fast.
Researchers have been raising general alarms about AI’s hefty energy requirements over the past few months. But a peer-reviewed analysis published this week in Joule is one of the first to quantify the demand that is quickly materializing. A continuation of the current trends in AI capacity and adoption are set to lead to NVIDIA shipping 1.5 million AI server units per year by 2027. These 1.5 million servers, running at full capacity, would consume at least 85.4 terawatt-hours of electricity annually—more than what many small countries use in a year, according to the new assessment.
The analysis was conducted by Alex de Vries, a data scientist at the central bank of the Netherlands and a Ph.D. candidate at Vrije University Amsterdam, where he studies the energy costs of emerging technologies. Earlier de Vries gained prominence for sounding the alarm on the enormous energy costs of cryptocurrency mining and transactions. Now he has turned his attention to the latest tech fad. Scientific American spoke with him about AI’s shocking appetite for electricity.
[An edited and condensed transcript of the interview follows.]
Why do you think it’s important to examine the energy consumption of artificial intelligence?
Because AI is energy-intensive. I put one example of this in my research article: I highlighted that if you were to fully turn Google’s search engine into something like ChatGPT, and everyone used it that way—so you would have nine billion chatbot interactions instead of nine billion regular searches per day—then the energy use of Google would spike. Google would need as much power as Ireland just to run its search engine.
Now, it’s not going to happen like that because Google would also have to invest $100 billion in hardware to make that possible. And even if [the company] had the money to invest, the supply chain couldn’t deliver all those servers right away. But I still think it’s useful to illustrate that if you’re going to be using generative AI in applications [such as a search engine], that has the potential to make every online interaction much more resource-heavy.
I think it’s healthy to at least include sustainability when we talk about the risk of AI. When we talk about the potential risk of errors, the unknowns of the black box, or AI discrimination bias, we should be including sustainability as a risk factor as well. I hope that my article will at least encourage the thought process in that direction. If we’re going to be using AI, is it going to help? Can we do it in a responsible way? Do we really need to be using this technology in the first place? What is it that an end user wants and needs, and how do we best help them? If AI is part of that solution, okay, go ahead. But if it’s not, then don’t put it in.
What parts of AI’s processes are using all that energy?
You generally have two big phases when it comes to AI. One is a training phase, which is where you’re setting up and getting the model to teach itself how to behave. And then you have an inference phase, where you just put the model into a live operation and start feeding it prompts so it can produce original responses. Both phases are very energy-intensive, and we don’t really know what the energy ratio there is. Historically, with Google, the balance was 60 percent inference, 40 percent training. But then with ChatGPT that kind of broke down—because training ChatGPT took comparatively very little energy consumption, compared with applying the model.
It’s dependent on a lot of factors, such as how much data are included in these models. I mean, these large language models that ChatGPT is powered by are notorious for using huge data sets and having billions of parameters. And of course, making these models larger is a factor that contributes to them just needing more power—but it is also how companies make their models more robust.
What are some of the other variables to consider when thinking about AI energy usage?
Cooling is not included in my article, but if there were any data to go on, it would have been. A big unknown is where those servers are going to end up. That matters a whole lot, because if they’re at Google, then the additional cooling energy use is going to be somewhere in the range of a 10 percent increase. But global data centers, on average, will add 50 percent to the energy cost just to keep the machines cool. There are data centers that perform even worse than that.
What type of hardware you’re using also matters. The latest servers are more efficient than older ones. What you’re going to be using the AI technology for matters, too. The more complicated a request, and the longer the servers are working to fulfill it, the more power is consumed.
In your assessment, you outline a few different energy-use scenarios from worst- to best-case. Which is the most likely?
In the worst-case scenario, if we decide we’re going to do everything on AI, then every data center is going to experience effectively a 10-fold increase in energy consumption. That would be a massive explosion in global electricity consumption because data centers, not including cryptocurrency mining, are already responsible for consuming about 1 percent of global electricity. Now, again, that’s not going to happen—that’s not realistic at all. It’s a useful example to illustrate that AI is very energy-intensive.
On the opposite end, you have this idea of no growth—zero. You have people saying that the growth in demand will be completely offset by improving efficiency, but that’s a very optimistic take that doesn’t include what we understand about demand and efficiency. Every time a major new technology makes a process more efficient, it actually leads to more people demanding whatever is being produced. Efficiency boosts demand, so boosting efficiency is not really saving energy in the end.
What do I think is the most likely path going forward? I think the answer is that there’s going to be a growth in AI-related electricity consumption. At least initially, it’s going to be somewhat slow. But there’s the possibility that it accelerates in a couple of years as server production increases. Knowing this gives us some time to think about what we’re doing.
What additional research or other steps might be needed?
We need a higher quality of data. We need to know where these servers are going. We need to know the source of the energy itself. Carbon emissions are the real numbers that we care about when it comes to environmental impact. Energy demand is one thing, but is it coming from renewables? Is it coming from fossil fuels?
Maybe regulators should start requiring energy use disclosures from AI developers because there’s just very little information to go on. It was really hard to do this analysis—anyone who is trying to work on AI at the moment is facing the same challenges, where information is limited. I think it would help if there was more transparency. And if that transparency doesn’t come naturally, which it hasn’t so far, then we should think about giving it a little bit of a push.
Lauren Leffer is a contributing writer and former tech reporting fellow at Scientific American. She covers many subjects, including artificial intelligence, climate and weird biology, because she's curious to a fault. Follow her on X @lauren_leffer and on Bluesky @laurenleffer.bsky.social
Curated by Our Editors
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ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA”:
There are 7 categories, with the latest addition, (#7) being a Friday weekly roundup of IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) global nuclear news stories. Also included is a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives. The feature categories provide articles and information about ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links with headlines concerning the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
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Nuclear Power
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A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS, Wednesday, (10/02/2024)
All Things Nuclear
NEWS
The Handy Quantum Physics Answer Book | CUNY Graduate Center
CUNY Graduate Center
... nuclear power, heck, even solar power,” said Liu, winner of ... Charles Liu is the host of The LIUniverse podcast, a podcast covering all things ...
A Roundtable Discussion on Logistics and Transportation - Greenville Business Magazine
Greenville Business Magazine
It's all about continuous improvement, and I fight it every day. ... If it's beyond a reasonable settlement for restitution, then that is nuclear, and ...
From the city to the suburbs, swing state voters in Wisconsin share election opinions - KSUT
KSUT
... All Things Considered, NPR's award-winning afternoon newsmagazine, since 2015. During his first two years on the program, listenership to All Things ...
Nuclear Power
NEWS
Power-Thirsty AI Turns to Mothballed Nuclear Plants. Is That Safe? | Scientific American
Scientific American
As Microsoft strikes a deal to restart a reactor at Three Mile Island to power AI, nuclear specialists weigh in on the unprecedented process.
New Nuclear's Pivotal Moment | Breakthrough Energy
Breakthrough Energy
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has a long history of licensing safe nuclear reactors. They are the gold standard of the world's nuclear ...
First nuclear plant recommissioned in US history as part of $2.8bn funding - Yahoo Finance
Yahoo Finance
US Secretary of Energy Jennifer M Granholm commented: “Nuclear power is America's largest source of carbon-free of electricity, supporting hundreds of ...
Nuclear War
NEWS
The West is Sleepwalking into Nuclear War - The European Conservative
The European Conservative
The West is Sleepwalking into Nuclear War. SERGEY ILYIN / POOL / AFP. Moscow's tradition of acting on its threats should inspire caution in Western ...
Is Putin Bluffing? Russia Keeps Making Nuclear War Threat over Ukraine
The National Interest
As the war in Ukraine nears its 1000th day, Russian officials have escalated nuclear threats against the U.S., Ukraine, and the West.
How will Israel retaliate against Iran's missile attack? - NBC News
NBC News
... war? Could Israel seek to target Iran's oil facilities and even ... The nuclear issue has gained increasing salience in recent years. Iran ...
Nuclear War Threats
NEWS
How seriously should we take Putin's threats of nuclear escalation? - The Hill
The Hill
How seriously should we take Putin's threats of nuclear escalation? by ... nuclear capability at the most precarious moment of the Yom Kippur War.
Iran Is Inching Toward a Nuclear Weapons Breakout: What Does This Mean for the United States?
The Heritage Foundation
... threat of nuclear war to drive the United States out of Asia.60 ... North Korea's seemingly endless series of nuclear threats against the United ...
Is Putin Bluffing? Russia Keeps Making Nuclear War Threat over Ukraine
The National Interest
... nuclear threats against the U.S., Ukraine, and the West ... And this isn't the first time Putin or the Kremlin has threatened nuclear war against the
Yellowstone Caldera
NEWS
Mag. 2.8 quake - South Pacific Ocean, 29 km east of Hicks Bay, Gisborne, New Zealand, on ...
Volcano Discovery
Yellowstone quakes · Yellowstone quakes · Latest earthquakes under Yellowstone volcano ... caldera, and Ijen in East Java. Past Quakes · Past Quakes.