AI increases data center energy consumption – straining the grid and slowing sustainability efforts

The rise of artificial intelligence has had such a huge impact on large tech companies that their energy consumption and thus their carbon emissions have increased dramatically.

The spectacular success of large language models like ChatGPT has helped fuel this growth in energy demand. At 2.9 watt-hours per ChatGPT request, AI queries require about 10 times as much electricity as traditional Google queries, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit research firm. Emerging AI capabilities like audio and video generation are likely to contribute to this energy demand.

AI's energy needs are changing the calculations of energy companies, ...