The AI boom will push America's shaky power grid to its limit

Fri 5 July 2024

• The artificial intelligence boom is straining America's power grid.

• AI queries can use 30 times more energy than traditional searches, massively escalating power demand.

• "The cost of that Gen AI architecture is freaking out of control," Baird strategist Ted Mortonson said.

First it was electric vehicles. Then it was bitcoin. Now its AI.

All three trends have sparked ongoing concerns about the power-hungry nature of new technologies as they push America's shaky power grid to the limit.

It appears that the AI boom, which is still in its early days, might be the biggest stressor on the country's electric grid.

That's because mega-cap tech companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on power-hungry AI-enabled GPU chips, which are housed in massive data centres that require state-of-the-art cooling technologies to dissipate the heat generated from the computers.

AI research company Hugging Face has estimated that generative AI search queries can use 30 times as much energy as a traditional Google search.

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