IT House reported on March 10 that according to The New Yorker, the popular chatbot ChatGPT needs to handle more than 200 million requests per day, and its power consumption may be as high as 500,000 kilowatt hours per day. In comparison, the average daily electricity consumption of an average American household is only 29 kilowatt hours, which means that ChatGPT’s daily electricity consumption is more than 17,000 times that of an average household.
What’s even more worrying is that as generative AI becomes more popular, its power consumption may further surge. Alex de Vries, a data scientist at the Dutch Central Bank, calculated in a paper published in the sustainable energy journal Joule that if Google applied generative artificial intelligence technology to all searches, it would consume approximately 29 billion kilowatt hours per year. This is equivalent to the combined annual electricity production of Kenya, Guatemala and Croatia.
However, it is currently difficult to assess how much power the booming AI industry consumes. According to The Verge, large technology companies have been leading the development of AI, but they are very secretive about their energy consumption, and there are also huge differences in how different artificial intelligence models operate.
However, de Vries still made a rough calculation in the paper based on the figures released by Nvidia. According to CNBC, citing data from New Street Research, Nvidia accounts for about 95% of the graphics processor market share. de Vries estimated in the paper that by 2027, the entire AI industry will consume 85 to 134 terawatt hours (IT Home Note: terawatt, equivalent to 134 billion kilowatt hours) of electricity per year.
“This equates to AI consuming probably about half of the world’s electricity by 2027,” de Vries told The Verge. “I think that’s a pretty significant number.”
Some of the world’s most power-hungry businesses pale in comparison. According to calculations by Businessinsider based on the Consumer Energy Solutions report, Samsung’s annual power consumption is close to 23 terawatt hours. Data centers, networks and user equipment of Google and other technology giants consume slightly more than 12 terawatt hours per year. Microsoft’s annual power consumption The amount of electricity is slightly over 10 terawatt hours.
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