Alex de Vries predicted that current AI technology could be on track to annually consume as much electricity as the entire country of Ireland (29.3 terawatt-hours per year). For comparison, the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index suggests Bitcoin uses 141-160 terawatt-hours (TWhs) of electricity annually. That’s ~0.7% of the world’s consumed electricity in 2022. The process of minting cryptocurrency is a very public activity, so the numbers are difficult to fudge. The cost of bringing extremely expensive nuclear reactors back online and driving demand for environmentally destructive Uranium mining and processing suggests de Vries’ guess was conservative.
I’m reminded of Jevon’s Paradox as applied to energy generation. I hope the AI bubble pops before much more investment goes into nuclear energy.
Microsoft is already measuring its datacenters in GW. I would not be surprised, if next year all of big tech add data centers consuming as much as Ireland. Microsoft wirh 5GW is already pretty close.
And a coal comeback. And a revival of abandoned oil wells. In fact, there are projects *for the use small nuclear reactors to power more fracking. It’s all very stupid.
