{"id":77291,"date":"2025-08-19T07:59:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-19T07:59:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/77291\/"},"modified":"2025-08-19T07:59:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T07:59:11","slug":"ai-is-power-hungry-paul-krugman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/77291\/","title":{"rendered":"AI Is Power-Hungry – Paul Krugman"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This is a post about AI, whose proponents are downright messianic in describing it as the technology of the future. Maybe. But much of their advocacy seems to ignore some mundane limits to AI\u2019s growth \u2014 limits I\u2019ll try to illustrate by talking about a technology of the past.<\/p>\n

I was probably 9 or 10 when my father took me to a Horn & Hardart automat. For those too young to remember \u2014 who I hope are a large fraction of my readers \u2014 these were establishments in which a variety of sandwiches and other foods were displayed behind glass doors. You would serve yourself by putting coins into a slot, which would unlock the door and let you extract your egg salad sandwich or whatever.<\/p>\n

At the time (and at my age) it seemed wonderfully futuristic: Food service without people! In reality, of course, automats weren\u2019t automated; each required a substantial staff to operate the kitchen and keep refilling those glass-doored compartments. And because automats weren\u2019t all they pretended to be, they were eventually driven out of business by the rise of fast food.<\/p>\n

Many applications of information technology are, like the automats of yore, less miraculous than they seem. True, the user experience makes you feel as if you\u2019ve transcended the material world. You click a button on Amazon\u2019s web site and a day or two later the item you wanted magically appears on your porch. But behind that hands-free experience lie a million-strong workforce and a huge physical footprint of distribution centers and delivery vehicles.<\/p>\n

And the disconnect between the trans-material feel of the consumer experience and the physical realities that deliver that experience is especially severe for the hot technology of the moment, AI. We\u2019re constantly arguing about whether AI is a bubble, whether it can really live up to the hype. We don\u2019t talk enough about AI\u2019s massive use of physical resources, especially but not only electricity.<\/p>\n

And we certainly don\u2019t talk enough about (a) how U.S. electricity pricing effectively subsidizes AI and (b) the extent to which limitations on generating capacity may nonetheless severely limit the technology\u2019s growth.<\/p>\n

How much generating capacity are we talking about? The Department of Energy estimates that data centers already consumed 4.4 percent of U.S. electricity in 2023, and expects that to grow to as much as 12 percent by 2028:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Source: Department of Energy<\/a><\/p>\n

AI isn\u2019t the only source of rising electricity demand from data centers. There are other drivers including, alas, crypto \u2014 which still has no legitimate use case, but now has powerful political backing. But Goldman Sachs believes that AI will account for a large fraction of rising data center demand:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Source: Goldman Sachs<\/a><\/p>\n

With Sam Altman of OpenAI promising to spend \u201ctrillions<\/a>\u201d on data centers in the near future \u2014 and sneering at economists who, he imagines, are wringing their hands \u2014 I wouldn\u2019t be surprised to see demand come in at the high end of the Department of Energy\u2019s projections. True, the AI bubble might burst before that happens, with potentially ugly consequences for the wider economy. But that\u2019s a subject for another post.<\/p>\n

So suppose that AI really does consume vast quantities of electricity over the next few years. Where are all those kilowatt-hours supposed to come from?<\/p>\n

America is, of course, adding generating capacity as you read this, and can accelerate that expansion if it chooses to. But there are two big obstacles to any attempt to keep up with the demand from AI.<\/p>\n

The first is that in recent years growth in U.S. generating capacity has become increasingly dependent on growth in renewable energy. According to S&P Global, almost 90 percent of the generating capacity added in the first 8 months of 2024 came from solar and wind:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Source: S&P Global<\/a><\/p>\n

Why is this a problem? Because Donald Trump and his minions have a deep, irrational hatred for renewable energy. Not only have they eliminated many of the green energy subsidies introduced by the Biden administration, they have been actively trying to block<\/a> solar and wind projects.<\/p>\n

So even as Trump promises to make America dominant in AI, he\u2019s undermining a different cutting-edge technology \u2014 renewable energy \u2014 that is crucial to AI\u2019s growth.<\/p>\n

Suppose that electric utilities manage somehow to get around Trump\u2019s anti-technology roadblocks and build the extra generating capacity. Who will pay for all that spending? The answer, given the way we regulate these utilities \u2014 and as natural monopolies, they must be regulated \u2014 is that the cost of adding capacity to power data centers is passed on to ordinary customers who have nothing to do with AI. This is already happening: Over the past 6 months retail electricity prices<\/a> have risen at a 9 percent annual rate, four times as fast as overall consumer prices.<\/p>\n

Last week the watchdog for PJM Interconnection LLC, the nation\u2019s largest grid, declared that this must stop, that it \u201crecommends that large data centers be required to bring their own generation<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, requiring that the AI industry take responsibility for the costs it imposes makes a lot of sense. It would by no means end progress in AI. As the website Tech Policy notes<\/a>, there are many AI applications in which smaller, more focused models can perform almost as well as the bloated, all-in-one models currently dominating the field, while consuming far less energy. Until now there has been no incentive to take energy consumption into account, but there\u2019s every reason to believe that we could achieve huge efficiency gains at very low cost.<\/p>\n

But will we do the sensible thing? It\u2019s obvious that any attempt to make AI more energy-efficient would lead to howls from tech bros who believe that they embody humanity\u2019s future \u2014 and these bros have bought themselves a lot of political power.<\/p>\n

So I don\u2019t know how this will play out. I do know that your future electricity bills depend on the answer.<\/p>\n

MUSICAL CODA<\/p>\n

The Grateful Dread do reggae covers of Grateful Dead songs. We saw them last week; this, recorded on my phone, seems appropriate given the shameful events in Alaska. \u201cDon\u2019t you let that deal go down.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is a post about AI, whose proponents are downright messianic in describing it as the technology of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":77292,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-77291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77291\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}