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How much energy do data centers and artificial intelligence use?

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Re: How much energy do data centers and artificial intelligence use?

#41

Post by cagenut »

Abh1Works wrote: post #39

Something I havent heard alot of people talk about is meat. I dont think you can be against data centers, but also buy cheap meat. I understand food != compute, and thats a fact. BUT the same people who are protesting against AI data centers are the same people who fly every year, eat steak in every other dinner, and generally indulge in activities that are bad for the planet (and theres no acknowledgement).

and flying. beef and flying are the two most impactful personal choices you can make (nearly everything else has a 'over a decade'/difficult-life-tradeoff factor). beef and flying are easy.

Re: How much energy do data centers and artificial intelligence use?

#42

Post by thereisnospork »

bakies wrote: post #28
shipman05 wrote: post #10

I'm dismayed by the current political discourse on this topic. Seems like the two camps are 1) let mega corps build data centers with impunity or 2) use NIMBY tactics to oppose them in all cases. I want to see a pro-growth approach that makes the mega corps assume the costs of their negative externalities. I want to see an increased build out of renewable and nuclear energy sources. I want to see environmental protec…

Seriously, it can't be that hard to build a datacenter and not piss people off. The economics demanded scale so fast that the capitalists don't care enough to thoughtfully plan this stuff out.

This is America, anything you do pisses people off[0]. The problem is that the rest of us listen to them because it is easier to understand one person's complaint than the distributed pain of electricity being a penny per kwh more expensive.

[0]I've seen people whinging about building solar plants in the desert, windmills off shore, data centers in silicon valley...

Re: How much energy do data centers and artificial intelligence use?

#43

Post by sroussey »

dundarious wrote: post #33
sroussey wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2% for one thing that most people hardly use at all AI is hardly used at all? Basically every company and consumer in the country is using it, transitively if not directly.

Every company is using it? The deli and the laundromat too? Every consumer? Maybe transitively because they use Google or what have you, but most people I know still don't really know what AI is, never mind have a puritan revulsion over using it (some people are quite performative about this on here), but they just don't use it themselves, except transitively on occasion.

Everyone using Google. Watching Netflix. Listening to Spotify. Shopping at Amazon or a Shopify store.

Or reading almost anything these days. :(

Advertising they see. Using a credit card, writing a check.

Beam forming wireless signals.

It’s everywhere. Not all AI is an LLM.

Re: How much energy do data centers and artificial intelligence use?

#44

Post by everdrive »

gruez wrote: post #14
DenisM wrote: post #3

Select quote: * 5% of electricity in the United States is used to power data centers. For AI-focused ones specifically, it’s probably around 2%.* I think it’s massive.

>I think it’s massive. So what about the other 3%? That's not "massive"? Or it gets a pass because it's not AI? The whole debate over datacenter resource consumption feels like a rorschach test. Either you think the technology is transformative and therefore the resource consumption is justified, or you think it's slop and therefore any resource consumption can't be justified.

By all means, cull them all. I'm sure the remaining 3% support (in one way or another) terrible web apps that use 150 MB of javascript and data brokers.

Re: How much energy do data centers and artificial intelligence use?

#45

Post by helloplanets »

simonw wrote: post #22

> For longer queries or requests that rely on AI agents or reasoning, the footprint is higher. Epoch AI estimated that a long query (7,500 words of input) could consume about 2.5 Wh, and a very long one (75,000 words) could consume 40 Wh. Those are far higher than the simple text query. One thing that's missing from almost all of these energy estimates is the impact of "agentic" queries, which were rare a year ago an…

With the new Ultracode modes in Claude Code and Codex it's been taken to the next level. I mean, multi agent systems have been available for a long time, but the newest models seem to be much more RL'd for them.

Both GPT-5.6 and Fable will happily run 3+ hours straight off a relatively simple goal in that mode, burn through millions of tokens in the process.

Not saying it's great bang for your buck, but just that those modes are there and being pushed by the companies.

Re: How much energy do data centers and artificial intelligence use?

#46

Post by thegrim33 »

shipman05 wrote: post #10

I'm dismayed by the current political discourse on this topic. Seems like the two camps are 1) let mega corps build data centers with impunity or 2) use NIMBY tactics to oppose them in all cases. I want to see a pro-growth approach that makes the mega corps assume the costs of their negative externalities. I want to see an increased build out of renewable and nuclear energy sources. I want to see environmental protec…

It's less a fault of "democracy" and more a fault of partisan extremism where all dimensionality and nuance is removed, it's intentionally made into an "us" vs "them" issue with only two extreme sides, where either you're fully with "us" and everything we believe, or you're evil/horrible/etc. If you dare to fall in the middle somewhere, that's not allowed by the extremists on one side; you're lumped in with and seen as no different than the opposite extreme.

Re: How much energy do data centers and artificial intelligence use?

#47

Post by gruez »

dundarious wrote: post #35
gruez wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>that most people hardly use at all Speak for yourself. For "most people", "streaming" is basically TV for them, and the average american watches 2.6 hours per day [1]. It's probably safe to say that at least half of that is "streaming" of some sort, even more if you include other types of "streaming" like music streaming. Moreover nowadays even if they're not plopped in front of a TV, they're watching short form vid…

I was referring to AI in that statement, I wrote it somewhat poorly.

The "hardly use" comparison quickly runs into issues, though. If I use AI and it completes a job that would have taken an hour in 1 minute, should that be counted as a factor against AI, because I'm "hardly" using it (1 minute) compared to the alternative (1 hour)?

Re: How much energy do data centers and artificial intelligence use?

#48

Post by barbazoo »

shipman05 wrote: post #10

I'm dismayed by the current political discourse on this topic. Seems like the two camps are 1) let mega corps build data centers with impunity or 2) use NIMBY tactics to oppose them in all cases. I want to see a pro-growth approach that makes the mega corps assume the costs of their negative externalities. I want to see an increased build out of renewable and nuclear energy sources. I want to see environmental protec…

> the two camps are

Or are those just the two ends of the spectrum? I don't know anyone on either extreme of the spectrum.

Re: How much energy do data centers and artificial intelligence use?

#50

Post by barbazoo »

Abh1Works wrote: post #39

Something I havent heard alot of people talk about is meat. I dont think you can be against data centers, but also buy cheap meat. I understand food != compute, and thats a fact. BUT the same people who are protesting against AI data centers are the same people who fly every year, eat steak in every other dinner, and generally indulge in activities that are bad for the planet (and theres no acknowledgement).

> The people that... are the same people that...

Just stop. If you fund yourself starting a sentence that way, just close the browser.

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