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Written by Wim🧮 on 2025-01-14 at 13:04

The real problem with the current AI hype is not "AI" in itself but what it is causing:

• The hype creates an expectation of huge growth in demand. Data centre companies have to start building capacity before this demand is realised, even if it never realises. As a result, data centre capacity is being built up right now at an unprecedented scale.
• This requires electricity generators to provision capacity for those future data centres, even if they are never used. (1/5)

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Written by Wim🧮 on 2025-01-14 at 13:05

• This in turn means electricity generators are not phasing out fossil fuel generation as they want to maximise generation capacity to maximise future profits. And so global emissions from electricity generation are not decreasing at all, quite to the contrary: new fossil fuel powered electricity plants are being developed as a result and mothballed ones are brought back on line. (2/5)

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Written by Wim🧮 on 2025-01-14 at 13:05

To put some figures on this: the current global data centre capacity is 55GW, which means 482 TWh/year. Global electricity generation is 30,000 TWh/y. Production of chips for data centres is currently around 21 TWh/y.

Suppose this grows by 10x in ten years (that is about 25% per year and is within current projections). Then we get 4820 TWh for the data centres and 210 for the chips so 5000 TWh or an extra 2.4 GtCO2e (on a total global CO2 budget of 12 GtCO2e). (3/5)

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Written by Wim🧮 on 2025-01-14 at 13:05

If you think that all sounds crazy, the UK government has just said we need to increase the UK's AI research compute capacity by 20x in five years. Dell’s CEO has said that global data centre capacity must increase by 100x over the next 10 years. And OpenAI's Altman has said the world need 100x more GPUs production capacity, which amounts to the same.

And even if none of this happens, the damage is already being done.

(4/5)

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Written by Wim🧮 on 2025-01-14 at 13:05

Needless to say, 100x growth would be a disaster: it would mean the data centres alone would consume 50,000 TWh/year. That would be 24 GtCO2e, so purely the emissions from making the servers would double of the global emissions budget to meet the climate targets. And that is without even taking into account the embodied carbon of all that infrastructure. (5/5)

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Toot

Written by Wim🧮 on 2025-01-15 at 19:58

Coda: the figures in the above thread are quite handwavy. I did a more nuanced analysis and will write up an article about it. The results are a little less dramatic but the overall conclusion remains the same: the AI hype is resulting in increased emissions even if it does not deliver on its promises. And this at a critical time when emissions must come down urgently and drastically.

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