“Right now, I think it is extreme and over-the-top,” says Krintz, who is also the chair of the Computing Community Consortium’s Climate Task Force. “However, I think in the end, it’s going to force technology companies to identify, ‘OK. What is the right hardware? What is the right software?’ There will be pressure from politicians as well as society.”
Krintz says it will be up to voters and policy-makers to help prevent the worst predictions about AI’s future energy use from coming true. AI-specific servers could soon suck up 134 terawatt hours of electricity a year on their own—as much as an entire nation. Together, crypto mining and AI could double global data center energy consumption by 2026, according to an International Energy Agency report released earlier this year. And The Week reports that over 300 million people in the US and Canada could soon experience power outages, in part due to AI’s massive energy demands.