“Boston Consulting Group believes that AI and regular data center demand will grow to 7% of total electricity demand by 2030. To put this in context, this is the equivalent of the electricity used for lighting in every home business and factory across the United States. It’s a huge amount of energy. Most traditional data centers that were built 10 years ago were 10 megawatts or less. Today, it’s not uncommon to see 100-megawatt data centers. And with our clients, we’re talking about data centers that approach 1,000 megawatts. And they require 24/7 power. This is something that doesn’t get talked about enough in my opinion.”
That is from Constellation Energy’s CEO Joseph Dominguez (Source: The Transcript) – who of course is talking his own book but still.
Others confirm this, like the IEA – which thinks AI energy demand will double by 2026 – “that’s equivalent to adding a new heavily industrialized country like Germany to the planet”.
There are other huge environmental impacts – e.g. water.
