Consumer of artificial intelligence will sooner be more than bitcoin mining

The rapid development of artificial intelligence has made the supply of electricity needed to be a serious challenge. The latest studies show that the power consumption of artificial intelligence datacenters may soon be outstanding the electricity needed for bitcoin extraction.

According to Tekles, Alex de Ferris-Gao, a doctoral student at the Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of Amsterdam, examined this transformation in his research published in Joule. The research, based on the general technical specifications of the devices, analyzes and corporate information, estimates the volume of production and energy consumption of artificial intelligence hardware.

Providing electricity needed for artificial intelligence is a serious challenge for technology companies

Since major technology companies rarely expose their artificial intelligence operations, the researcher has used Triangulation to estimate. He has estimated the amount of electricity needed by these operations by examining the supply chain of advanced chips and the production capacity of key actors such as TSMC.

Accordingly, every Nvidia H100 artificial intelligence chip, one of the main components of modern data centers, consumes 2 watts of electricity when implementing complex models. If we multiply this number by millions of Nvidia H100 chips, the total energy consumption will reach a worrying surface.

The researcher estimates that artificial intelligence hardware may require between 1.5 and 2.5 GW of electricity. This is also higher than the total power consumption of Ireland.

The main wave of increased energy consumption in artificial intelligence is still on the way. TSMC’s Cowos packaging technology allows powerful processors and high -speed memory to become the heart of modern artificial intelligence systems. Du Ferris-Ghao says TSMC has doubled its Cowos production capacity between the ages of 1 and 2, but the demand of chip-produced companies such as Nvidia and AMD is still beyond the release.

TSMC apparently plans to double the production capacity of Cowos. The researcher predicts that if the current trend continues, the total electricity required by artificial intelligence systems could reach 2 GW by the end of the year, which is approximately the average electricity consumption of the UK.