This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
So households will pay higher prices because of this shortage. It's time to separate markets and prices between vital and non vital stuff and make the non vital market bear the costs of these higher prices. That makes it more fair.
Also why can't these datacenters be in the desert? Use daytime solar and wind down at night. Follow the sun.
The study this cites has data centre (so not just AI but all internet stuff) rising to 300TWh by 2030. Two years ago the USA's power usage was 4000TWh a year. So in about 6 years time they estimate that data centres will be using about 8% of 2022's electricity usage, up from currently about 4%. An increase sure, but hardly one that's going to move electricity prices significantly.
I can't find the source but I remember an article thatdiscussed the rate solar energy is adopted. The researchers made lower and upper bound predictions, and what if all solar PV development stopped immediately. The worst case scenario based on availabile data suggested a three fold increase in solar PV electricity generation, the number used by the article you cited, to a best case scenario of solar PV increasing to the power of three, really big exponential growth. Now the optimistic model seemed a bit too optimistic for me, but it at least suggested that there is a lot more capacity to build out solar PV. If that capacity is realized or wasted was the biggest unknown factor in that study, which like duh. Still, I took it to mean that the future will probably be a little bit more optimistic than the most pessimistic projections. It's a small comfort.
That not how prices work in a shortage.
I didn't say anything about how prices work in a shortage, but I also sincerely doubt a 4% increase in 6 years (so 0.7% annually) is going to cause any shortages.
So, you have other information you are basing that on? Because the source is one of the top 3 consulting firms in the world.
I'm sure they will happily provide consultancy to the energy sector to avoid this issue, but I'm kinda surprised when random Lemmy accounts think they know better than a leading company like this.
Energy is a pretty tight market where supply and demand are tightly intertwined. So a big boom on the use side as AI is threatening has a good potential to outpace the capacity of the supply side to scale up.. thus creating scarcity, driving up prices.
Youve missread that article, it is saying rising demand generally may cause shortages, and that there is also predictions of growing demand fron datacentres, not that the later is the main cause of the former. I fact they suggest growth in electricty demand of a quarter in 2 years, vastly more than the 4% in 6 years growth in datacentre demand.
If EV get out of their slump, they will devour every last electron that we have and we will need 10 times the current production.
Can't wait for the bubble to burst!
It's not going to burst, it's an incredible marketing opportunity that will invade our privacy until and unless we make it illegal. Every screen, camera, vehicle, tool will call home and report everything about you so that the company that sold you the item can make a buck.
AI is the greatest accelerant of our species demise.
If we ever actually manage to create a artificial general intelligence probably.
Right now I personally think the worst of it is that companies and governments have called our bluff, and figured out that as a whole we don't care enough to do anything about any of it. They can sell our data, track what and where we watch, shove ads in front of our eyeballs 24x7. Take away our right to protect ourselves legally, we'll just click OK and keep going.
Unless they can show an obvious advantage people aren't going to pay more to be spied on.
The reason that smartphones became so ubiquitous was because they were useful products that actually had capabilities that were attractive to the general public it was only afterwards that they started to be used for spying. It doesn't work the other way around you can't make a spy product and expect people to buy it.
It hasn't hurt TV sales yet.
It's not just AI though, it's all data centers. Including all the corporate stuff that has nothing to do with AI.
The company I work for has computers in data centers all over the world doing all sorts of stuff. Some of it is AI sure, but a lot of it is for remote networking or processing of large data sets, a lot of it is to do with scientific research and security research. That was going up even before AI came along.
Quite unintelligent for an industry based around intelligence
Yeah, hah, "intelligence".
It's ads all the way.
AI, Apocalypse of Intelligence
When people start seeing huge rises in their electric bill, don't be surprised to see normal everyday people trying to burn down datacenters.
