Technology

74180 readers

3776 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related news or articles.
Be excellent to each other!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

L3s@lemmy.world

enu@lemmy.world

technopagan@lemmy.world

L4s@lemmy.world

L3s@hackingne.ws

L4s@hackingne.ws

500

We hate AI because it's everything we hate (www.spacebar.news)

submitted 2 days ago by corbin@infosec.pub to c/technology@lemmy.world

212 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] iopq@lemmy.world 3 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Very wrong

In 2023 AI used 40 TWh of energy in the US out of a total 176 TWh used by data centers

https://davidmytton.blog/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-use/

[–] CorvidCawder@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 hours ago

From the blog you quoted yourself:

Despite improving AI energy efficiency, total energy consumption is likely to increase because of the massive increase in usage. A large portion of the increase in energy consumption between 2024 to 2023 is attributed to AI-related servers. Their usage grew from 2 TWh in 2017 to 40 TWh in 2023. This is a big driver behind the projected scenarios for total US energy consumption, ranging from 325 to 580 TWh (6.7% to 12% of total electricity consumption) in the US by 2028.

(And likewise, the last graph of predictions for 2028)

From a quick read of that source, it is unclear to me if it factors in the electricity cost of training the models. It seems to me that it doesn't.

I found more information here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/

Racks of servers hum along for months, ingesting training data, crunching numbers, and performing computations. This is a time-consuming and expensive process—it’s estimated that training OpenAI’s GPT-4 took over $100 million and consumed 50 gigawatt-hours of energy, enough to power San Francisco for three days.

So, I'm not sure if those numbers for 2023 paint the full picture. And adoption of AI-powered tools was definitely not as high in 2023 as it is nowadays. So I wouldn't be surprised if those numbers were much higher than the reported 22.7% of the total server power usage in the US.