Every company betting that artificial intelligence will transform how we work and live has a big—and growing—problem: AI is inherently ravenous for electricity. This means the AI industry is poised to run the equivalent of a planetary-scale experiment, according to experts both outside and inside the industry. As The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week, Microsoft is working on using its own AI to speed up the approval process for new nuclear power plants—to power that same AI. Those figures might even be an underestimate, says de Vries, because his calculations didn’t include the cost of cooling AI chips within data centers. On the one hand, AI systems must do their calculations afresh every time a user interacts with them.

Source: Wall Street Journal December 16, 2023 12:58 UTC