A junior at Hagerty High School pulls up her favorite AI website and types \u201cDesign me a prom dress. Blue and green. Floaty. Beads.\u201d And right before she hits \u201cgenerate,\u201d her mother looks over her shoulder and says, firmly, \u201csleeves.\u201d<\/p>\n
The result isn\u2019t quite what she wanted, so she adds more keywords and tries again. Fairy. Sparkle. Chiffon.\u00a0 \u201cUgh,\u201d she says to her mother. \u201cThis is so slow.\u201d Finally, she sees an image she loves, then asks the AI engine to build a pattern with estimates of how much fabric she\u2019ll need. Over the course of about 15 minutes of typing and waiting (\u201cSo slow!!\u201d) she\u2019s got a good start on a custom dress that will turn her friends green with envy.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s also used enough energy to charge her cellphone several times over, power the food processor her mom is using to make dinner and maybe even get the dishwasher through a cycle or two.<\/p>\n
Multiply that by the thousands of people living in Oviedo, most of whom spend at least part of every day on a computer, and then by all the cities in Florida and in the nation. Not all of them will be doing such energy-intensive tasks but \u2014 whether or not they realize it \u2014 almost all of them will have at least a brush with AI technology, whether it be in a simple web search or a suggestion for wording an email response.<\/p>\n
Of course, a teenager doesn\u2019t make those calculations or consider the cost behind her searches. She just wants a custom prom dress \u2014 and from her point of view, the technology she\u2019s using is free.<\/p>\n
But the power has to come from somewhere. The trillions \u2014 that\u2019s with a \u201ctr\u201d \u2014 of calculations, comparisons and exclusions that it takes to produce one image of a fantasy prom dress have to be performed somewhere. Those giant banks of processing power need spaces to physically exist, giant pipelines of power and often, water to help keep them cool.<\/p>\n
Increasingly, those critical computing functions are taking place in vast data centers scattered across the state. They are housed in nondescript warehouses whose exteriors rarely betray their greedy secret: They are gulping down electricity so voraciously that power companies are having to hastily add capacity to generate power. According to the website datacentermap.com, there are 12 such data centers operating around Orlando, among more than 100 across the state. On average, the energy demand from a medium-sized data center could power 15,000 households.<\/p>\n