All data centers in aggregate (AI and all other uses) use about 1.5% of electricity production, which itself is about 20% of total energy use.
So when people are focusing on AI above all other energy uses, it doesn't really paint an accurate picture of what's going on.
You can split up every single industries/topics/&c. into "yeah but it only use 1.5% of energy", "yeah but it only produces 1.5% of the co2"
Guess what happens when you add them up...
This kind of logic only works if the percentages for each industry are all equally that small, so you can treat them as all equally bad, but they are absolutely not.
>Guess what happens when you add them up...
I'll guess, they add up to 100%?
I don't see what's the insight here.
Thats OP's point - you need to reduce usage everywhere and pointing out that AI is only 1.5% doesn't take away from the fact that usage needs to be reduced there as well.
Wasn't crypto a significant percentage as well? And that was before the AI buildout started.
Not even close. Crypto has always been able to cut their own emissions before needing lots of compute.
AI on the other hand cannot, and still needs thousands of wasteful data centers.
It will normalize though once everyone is out of a job
I've heard many different groups tell me their small fraction is not the small fraction that matters.
It's not really about which one matters. They all matter. But here is a rough breakdown of global fossil fuel energy usage:
* Electricity: 27%
* Industry: 24%
* Transportation: 15%
* Agriculture & land use: 11%
* Buildings: 7%
Then within electricity, data centers use about 1.5% of global electricity. Within data centers, AI accounts for somewhere between 15-20% of energy use.
So if you take 27% × 1.5% × ~17%, you find that AI is currently responsible for something like 0.07% of global fossil fuel emissions.
It definitely matters in the "every bit matters" sense, but also the numbers paint a really different picture than you'd get from statement like the one we started with.
What otheer industries are hyping the need for tens of gigawatts, maybe hundreds? On top of that they are hyping the idea of building utterly unrealistic space stations that would cost 10 times what the ISS cost. So maybe people are focusing on the dishonesty instead of the energy use. One or the other I suppose.