Several fields are anticipating advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), which is sometimes referred to as the coming industrial revolution. These fields include architecture, pharmacology, engineering, transportation, medical, and engineering. But, experts in digital computing and environmentalists are of the opinion that the exponential development of AI may trigger a global ecological catastrophe.
The systems that drive AI require unbelievably massive amounts of water and energy to power them. The exponential development of AI may cause a global ecological disaster, according to “World Wide Waste” author Gerry McGovern.
One company whose massive power use has led to a 48% increase in carbon dioxide emissions over the last five years is Google. The amount of carbon dioxide gas emitted by the corporation in 2022–23 was more than 14 million tons, which is the same as the annual output of 29 gas-driven power stations.
Google’s data centers, which include millions of servers all across the globe, are a major reason why the company aims to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030. The amount of energy required to run these centers is growing as they include AI technologies. Artificial intelligence systems like Bard learn from massive volumes of data by seeing trends in user input and past references. This means that this approach leads to artificial intelligence search engines needing around ten times the amount of energy that Google searches use.
Graphics processing units (GPUs) are specialized microchips used by AI servers. These microchips may consume up to fifteen times as much power as regular microchips. Additionally, as AI models evolve, they are using more and more energy for operation and necessitating a wider variety of minerals for manufacturing. As an example, the amount of energy needed to train an AI model increased from 27 kilowatt-hours in 2020 to 1 million kilowatts in 2022, a 37,000-fold increase.
As a result, the market demand for data centers has skyrocketed. In 2022, Google’s data center utilization grew by 20 percent globally and Microsoft’s by 34 percent. The data center industry is valued at $350 billion now, and experts predict it will reach $650 billion before 2030.
