St. Louis, MO (KMOX) - Ever wonder why artificial intelligence requires so much energy? Total Information AM wanted to know too. So we asked Todd Thomas, CEO of Woodchuck -- a climate impact startup -- and author of the book series "Unleashing Abundant Energy."
Thomas explains, typical server farms for tech companies send you content that's already created, "you might have websites where you're going to buy something, or you might be going to an entertainment site where you're streaming movies or television shows. All that content already exists. So they're simply needing to serve you that content." That doesn't require as much energy.
But when it comes to AI, those servers are churning through sophisticated math equations, called algorithms. "So anytime you require content from AI, AI has to perform thousands, millions, billions of these complicated calculations to deliver you the content," explains Thomas, "so that requires a massive amount of energy. Typically, an AI server farm will use 30 to 100 kilowatts, about four to 10 times the amount of energy required by a typical server farm." And he adds some of the newer server farms planned by Microsoft's AI program are even larger, requiring the power needs equivalent to 80,000 homes.
Thomas points out, existing power grids just don't have extra juice. "There isn't a lot of excess power capacity. So when someone like Microsoft comes in and wants to put in a huge data farm, they have to increase the capacity within that grid or do something outside of that. And so what a lot of the large tech companies are looking at now is building their own small power units on site, because the local grids simply don't have capacities to support their additional energy needs."
How much are companies able to use green energy? He tells KMOX, sources like sun and wind are intermittent and don't provide the type of continual energy tech companies need. "Another option is biomass, because biomass can be stored and biomass can ramp up energy need as necessary. But the next step is a lot of these large tech companies are starting to look at nuclear as a way to provide their energy needs."
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