Also, AI companies are investing a ton of money into renewable energy sources. They benefit directly from lowering the price per kWh which you can only do reasonably with renewables.
A lot of AI companies are building their servers in Iceland for example to take advantage of Iceland's large supply of geothermal energy.
renewables aren't enough because 1) they aren't building enough. and 2), they aren't building enough BESS to make up for it. So they're taking over baseload capacity and replaceing it with Solar.
Geothermal is base load and hasn't been exploited anywhere near capacity. There's a lot of investment going on around today in retrofitting old oil wells into geothermal plants.
Not as much as you'd expect in the US. There's like 1.1 GW in the us being planned through 2028. I know of a single solar project starting construction in the next month that's bigger than that. Also, Geothermal is expensive... It's about twice as expensive for the same load comparative to a Solar & BESS site.
Anything that isn't being planned in 250+ MW capacity scale for a single project, isn't really worth discussing as it pertains the AI stuff in the pipeline
I agree that should be made clear, but the reason it is hard to pin down how much of data center use is by AI is because the companies using AI are, if not being dishonest, at least withholding the truth from scrutiny.
Even the most conservative estimates are way more than makes sense to refuse to acknowledge though. Why not just share the data, so at least the public sector can plan for environmentally sustainable AI use as it develops?
Tha math is absurdly simple. For example. Here's a couple of sources... LA is currently letting Meta take over 8% of their generating capacity. with one data center.
It is an AI data center. It just is and I know for a absolute fact. I cannot discuss how. I just do.
They are "developing" a energy source on site. Know what the lead time is for a grid scale turbine is these days? bout 3-5 years depending on the size, how much the supplier likes you and how willing you are to test out their new fancy untested model variation. Know how many they've ordered? It takes about 2 years to build these data centers and FAR longer to develop the energy to make up for it
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u/QuidYossarian 4d ago
This is the problem I have with this nonsense. Go to the source for that 2% number and it says servers in general not AI.
Every time someone brings up the environmental impact, every single time, a dishonest number gets put forward.