AI already uses as much energy as a small country. It's only the beginning.
In January, the International Energy Agency (IEA) issued its forecast for global energy use over the next two years. Included for the first time were projections for electricity consumption associated with data centers, cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence.
The IEA estimates that, added together, this usage represented almost 2 percent of global energy demand in 2022 — and that demand for these uses could double by 2026, which would make it roughly equal to the amount of electricity used by the entire country of Japan.
One of the areas with the fastest-growing demand for energy is the form of machine learning called generative AI, which requires a lot of energy for training and a lot of energy for producing answers to queries. Training a large language model like OpenAI’s GPT-3, for example, usesnearly 1,300 megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity, the annual consumption of about 130 US homes. According to the IEA, a single Google search takes 0.3 watt-hours of electricity, while a ChatGPT request takes 2.9 watt-hours. (An incandescent light bulb draws an average of 60 watt-hours of juice.) If ChatGPT were integrated into the 9 billion searches done each day, the IEA says, the electricity demand would increase by 10 terawatt-hours a year — the amount consumed by about 1.5 million European Union residents.