the the . ringback the artificial intelligence is driving a technological revolution about feeding. it requires much more like tricity to have on file more powerful computers and yet more jobs office senses. so how can such new the mom be met? what all the implications, this is inside story, the hello welcome to the show. i'm sammy's a than on the visual intelligence is the biggest revolution in technology. since

the internet arrives more than 3 decades ago, not a sound. it conjures up images of, of science fiction future with computers taking over from humans. but there's a more media issue, see the huge amount of energy needed to fuel this revolutionary new technology. the international energy agency estimates within 2 years a i and it's related technology is, will consume nearly as much energy as the entire annual electricity needs of japan powerful computers performing millions of functions, the 2nd need more electricity to drive and cool them. and also sensors where the house, what if countries come meet the energy demands of a i, computers will band, the people lose allison anyway, we'll put that to our guest shortly. but 1st let's look at how and why it requires so much. energy will down to centers that are off when referred to as home of the

internet. these facilities are way computing powell and vast amounts of dollars are all stored in process. they support a wide range of applications, including all the visual intelligence. well, the keep a life facilities running, they need to be constantly cool down. this requires more energy than any other type of dr center. for instance, a model slide chat, g p t require 10 times more electricity than a standard google search. and a single dollar to send to uses as much power as $80000.00 homes in the us. it's this rapid increase in energy consumption that has many people worried. critic site threatens to worse than climate change and the roadside is made by major tech companies. microsoft, for example, increased its greenhouse emissions by 30 percent last year, launched the jews who it's, i'm vicious, a hypo suits for the very organizations consuming all this energy claim. they're

also working on the solution. in video, the chip giant recently rolled out a new line of graphics processing units. the result of the use is $25.00 times less energy than previous models. but it's advocates arguing that a i will be crucial tools come back in climate change. the as well as bringing, i guess now have joining us from dublin. adrian westlaw, a technology editor for the irish independence. he focuses on advancements in technology industry. in manila, vince parrot is, is being a pioneer and renewable energy in asia and a former philippine energy, minnesota. and in montreal, sasha luciano, an artificial intelligence researcher and the climate lead that hugging face a global starts often responsible, open source, a. i a warm welcome to all of you. if i could start with adrian. first of all,

adrian, because this is, let's say it's not the most familiar topic to most people. explain to us just how integral, how important and vital the auto sense is all. now basic, i don't know cool functions of life that we might not realize. yeah, when an email leaves your computer or a text sleeves, your phone or you send someone a photo or you try to watch something on netflix or amazon or any of those normal day to day activities. all of that activity has to go through a data center from your phone, your computer, to a data center, then we lose it somewhere else. so they are absolutely in tag real to almost everything we do online. all arrive and vince adding to that picture is now explained to us how the combination of those 2. now when we add a i to our daily functions of life,

we add it to these dots to send those to the center is adrian says of everything we do. how does that by cop energy consumption? well, the additional server that we have in our office consumes about 7 kilowatt. but underneath the i server, which uses a lot of computing power, consumers about $30.00 to $100.00 kilowatt. so it's a multiple, 50 times energy consumption for an a i server versus that additional server that you have in your office or even uh in a shared office. so the is basically the golf holding off energy. it is a huge consumer of power. it's just incredible and it's almost equal now to the consumption. you mentioned japan and, but it's also produced as we'll talk about it in a while. carbon footprint that's almost equal to the carbon emission of

a country like brazil. so we gotta talk about what the file a i and data centers, some of the climate change. that's a lot. and here's just to add since fences. very kindly given us some shocking stats to get us rolling. sasha, here's another one i came across ireland in island dock to centers account for 18 percent of the energy consumption. that why is a eyes such an energy gobbling monster well, actually training and deploying a our models, especially these new generations of large language models like charge the p t actually uses a huge amounts of energy a lot more than previous generations of models that were a lot smaller and so essentially for each web search with dinner today are for each chat about you talk to, you have this big model that's using a lot of energy to give you all this data, all these answers. and actually, since his growth is so fast renewable energy,

how it hasn't really caught up. and so a lot of this energy is coming from coal is coming from natural gas. and so it brings with it huge emissions as was mentioned. and so essentially, because in this rat race to put a high end to everything, we're also pumping more energy, then we can produce renewable. and so is it the saucer? basically, it sounds like because a guy is doing operation more operations and doing them quicker. and for that, it needs a big of input of energy. well, especially like generative a i models like like for example, mid journey when you, when you generate an image, right? it's actually creating things from scratch as opposed to finding existing images on the internet or finding existing text on the internet. and so, you know, if you think about it, that takes a lot of compute that salt takes a lot of computational effort. and that comes with a huge energy footprint. right, adrian, you mentioned that is that the send to dots, a sense is that the center, no pun intended, of on lives and everything we're doing well given want,

sasha just explained that is the mon frontage. it going to outpace or it's already outpacing energy generation. i mean, it takes was a couple of years to build some kind of a dot to send to, but over 4 years to build a power generating installation. right. to. yeah, i mean with the very interesting situation here in arlington, dublin, where i am sitting, where as you point test data center consumption of energy has no quadrupled in the last 9 years. so the latest statistics show the data centers here in ireland for amazon and mehta and google, and all of a tech joins now to consume more energy. then all of the herb and the household put together. that's the 1st time that that's actually happened. so where is this new energy coming from? well, you know, ireland just to stick with the example. we've had to radically increase the amount of renewable energy winds. for example, there are some days in ireland where wind energy from wind turbines actually

amounts to the majority of all electricity crazy in the country and for the 1st 6 months of the year, i think it was about a 3rd of the energy. so the army here is that while these data centers and these a, i infused data centers are pushing the need for energy in countries like garland, they're actually forcing us to go more to renewable energy. so there may be a silver lining there, or that might be all to, to bring sasha back into the discussion because that's one of the things i think you're looking at right. when you take into account this rapid growth, it's going on. not only with dr senses, but also we should mention the the gadgets associated with a i, a smartphone, smart tvs, pcs, all of that stuff. is there a way to stop us from folding off the edge of the energy cliff? i can color that and i think that being a lot, we need

a lot more transparency about how much energy is being use, how many natural resources are being used currently we have a bit of a gap in terms of what we know and it's really frustrating because to hang on, talk to, you know, yeah, well, who is, who's the, is it corporations keeping this to themselves? so essentially, the way the reporting currently works is these end of year reports like we saw microsoft and google and then essentially they're saying, oh, things are getting out of hand. we are using too much energy. we're not meeting our climate targets, but we don't know where that's coming from. we don't know exactly what is contributing to this. of course, there's the usage of a i and in web search, for example, or in, in smartphones or in, you know, all these smart devices. but we really need to know what the different contributions are and how we can reduce them. so i think that the average user, if they knew how many grams of carbon or kilowatt hours of, of energy was used for each. yeah, web search. and they would maybe think twice before using type g, b t as a calculator, which is apparently stuff we've had people do. so putting the putting more transfer

made more to the companies and all the tanning outside show. we know how much c, o 2 energy is being used or produced or consumed right? now they're not. and essentially it's hard to get those exact numbers because it's, these data centers are distributed. so every time you do a google search or every time you credit charge you be days, probably a different server somewhere. and it's actually hard to meaningfully trace where that, where that call is happening, where the energy is coming from. and it requires effort on their part. and so you know, when companies don't have the incentives, they don't necessarily put in that effort. this is quite scary stuff. vince, i know he used to handle a policy when you were a minister all some parts of the world heading towards maybe an energy crisis. and they don't even know because we don't have level 5. so sasha said was for a country like singapore, which so obviously in, for it's a lot of its power from overseas or from energy. they will actually start to,

to do a moratorium on any new data centers in the country. they're really trying to manage their carbon footprint as part of their commitment to the power assignments ready. and for about a year they've stop allowing licenses for any new data centers. they've just recently opened a they even have almost like an option for new data centers, provided those data centers consume, or a plastic consume renewable energy or some sort of more efficient power consuming data set the technology so waiting for a country like singapore that can be replicated in other countries that more and more the government honestly why would be nice to a truck infrastructure investments in data sets but also. ready it displaces typical of energy consumption for the household or the ordinary household. good children. so take a point ready, starting to put a break in funny enough countries,

investors and data centers in this part of the world. i'd say ok, single for your not allow me more data centers. we're going to go across the river in militia. that's where they're all rushing to setup data centers. thing so interesting that guy is going on right now in terms of the odyssey of related to that adrian a, some countries having to prioritize access to energy between different sectors. and since you are an island his, i know this that i came up with data centers in island, a raising up so much energy, the country, and the one hand had to try and stick to its environmental goals. then by calling last year, they announce they're going to call 65000 cows over 3 years. was that to free up some energy and c o 2 allowance for the doctor centers is that's what's happening. the council taking a bullet for this one. so the 2 things are tangentially very time gently connected

. so we're not going as i'm calling 65000 cars to make their energy for data centers, but they are not to release it because ireland, like all the countries we've mentioned have carbon footprint targets. and we have to reduce our carbon footprint. so if we want to keep watching netflix, if we want our jace bt, if we want our social media, i, let's be clear. let's be honest. most of us do. this is a one way street. we're not going back to the days of no social media, no netflix, we're not going to stop developing a ice. so we are going to have to find other ways to try and mitigate our carbon footprint. actually, our lives is not a bad example in the last 10 years, the country has actually reduced its carbon footprint overall, at the same time as quadrupling the number of data centers. so i talk of amar, tory among data centers are limited, and we have that discussion here as well or not. and it's, it's, we have it in europe and in other countries. that is

a very limited discussion. you could hop because there is no going back. data centers are absolutely crucial for the organ and really things that we are all doing. now. we're all on a zoom like we can do that without a data center. you. you opened a good point that we're not going back. so i guess the question is, how do we go forward animals sustainable manner? and i want to bring session in a moment. but before we do that, let's write home this point and vince, i have a feeling there is, is it fair to say that policy might cause of kind of drop the ball a little bit? i mean, if a, we don't know, they don't always know how much energy is being consumed by some of these giants. and also looking at the map and the distribution of some of these data centers was the, a little bit of lack of oversight and in concentrating them in some areas. putting a huge strain on some powered grids of red ones that they say about 15 states in

the us have 80 percent of doctors centers of the country in them that com be an easy load on your power grid. that's true. some of, as you can imagine, every data center has to connect to the grid and you can't just put it in a, in a pasture far from any uh, what, because its substation. and so what you're seeing now interesting the, is a lot of brush of sorts where data center developers are buying land, not binding them. so provided they're near a transmission connection. right now there's a lot of rush in burden, believe it or not, because there's some available trust patient access in certain parts outside the burden. and you see the uh, outside tokyo for instance. um. and so everyone's trying to set up

a data center near a sub station near 3. and so there's, there's conservation, they're not spread out. and in that sense, it's bringing the costs of the data center is higher because prices are near this near a substation is also going no 2nd because of the power consumption of each power consumption of a data center locators of data centers and looking for countries where they're relatively colder, where it's not a spots like here right now. so being, so you see a lot of data centers instead of media. iron is a good example that's mania industry or the others and some parts of canada. so there's also a behavioral impact where countries are relatively cooler. 5 minutes are attracted locations for data centers because it shows, you know, they cool down the data centers naturally that in a more tropical or desperate stipend barn. so right sasha was the

solution going forward. i know you've been looking at different models is the solution more a i technology that's a accelerates is 3 d chips, chip cooling technology. is this a i can solve the problem of ion. so that's, so one way of seeing it, i think that is definitely part of the solution, but it's not the whole solution. and notably, for example, for manufacturing chips, they are, for example, getting more powerful, they're getting more efficient, but we don't know how much energy is being used to create them. so to manufacture these chips. so that's also a big, big black box. the lack of any power when you do exactly. yeah. so creating manufacturing these g p, use these, these high performance computing chips actually use a vast amounts of energy, vast amounts of water to purify the different layers of the silica and so it's really a that process as well. we need to understand what the cost and the benefits are, and that's essentially what i advocate for. we shouldn't start doing a i,

we shouldn't stop manufacturing trips, but we need to make sure that all the efforts that we're putting in all the costs, all the natural resources and the energy really makes it worse the that, those efforts and, and that deployment. and so a project that i'm working on now in terms of a i models is to develop a energy star ratings like efficiency ratings for different kinds of a model. so that when people are choosing a model or using a model or trying to legislate a model, they know how much energy it uses and they can make informed choices. adrian, from the research you've done, does it look like we can count on running dr. centers on green energy, wind, solar gradually it does. yeah. if you look at both of those energy sources, wind and solar, they have, there's an exponential rise in the curve of adoption of those technologies. some say there's almost too much solar at the moment to keep up with demand for that

source. so there is certainly help us by adrian. because what we often hear is that we haven't got enough solar wind in some countries to run even a 100 percent of your household needs. how can we have to have to adopt this sentence? so that is correct and that's because of the disparity of what those particular things need. reliability is a very important thing here, and we talk about the supply of energy with a wind turbine. when the wind doesn't blow, you need to, you know, resort back to traditional energy sources. fossil fuels may be nuclear if you have it, but a lot of countries don't have nuclear, which solar, it's one of the sun shines in countries like island. the sun doesn't shine very much. so you need a diversity of energy sources. they're both. i think the, you know, the overarching point is when you've got companies like samsung and apple and met at these are all developing, hey, i services, you can now listen to somebody on your phone and you, samsung phone, speak a different language to you and understand them and they can understand you all of

the kind of a i functionality that's coming to our normal everyday life is going to come through data centers. we're going to need the energy and we're just going to have to do with one place. they do have a lot more sunshine than 9, and i think is fair to say philippines. so from the perspective of the global south, vince of, you know, lot of concerns struggling ways development needs. and is this, you know how we're going to meet the challenge between getting the energy you need now to enter into this new era when you're a country in the global south and also trying to keep on top of your environment goals. so it's a loose lemme that's right. you know, what's interesting is what we call the hyper scalar. it's the microsoft, the amazon is or are they bob up when they. ready have to build or their own data center, or even ran at the data center for somebody else. they're now requiring that data

center to use this renewable energy, as the agent alludes to wind and solar. and in some parts of this region, even geothermal energy is being talked like in bases like in the philippines that needs an a shot shipment. but us mention as well when and sold our lot because in term event, you're not running 24 hours a day. why the data center has to run like a refrigerator, like a cold storage, 24 hour by 7. so it's usually the cause of blending off of clean and not so clean energy to feel with the data center. and more and more, this type of skaters were driving really the broke in a, i are demanding, the other data center starts putting in more efficient power, less power consuming data center. so there's

a big push in technology. there's something innovations going on the that, that leads a lot of investment needs a lot of cash, right. and i'm wondering for a country in the global south, are you worried about us heading towards a 3 tier world way? you'll have some countries, the energy produces a, a doing good. the wealthy countries which have already develop maybe can manage. but what about the cash strapped? the development developing countries which don't have that investment in a technology. and as you said, it was, they have is the intermittent sources. yeah. so some of what's happening is those huge infrastructure funds. there's several dozen um the data center funds that have now grown the, the names i just combinations of st cloud or digital edge or anything that has the word cloud in it. they're investing billions of dollars. a lot of them are in

countries that are very um, internet savvy korea's one of them to find a single bore, or even a large population like indonesia, where the philippines were definitely india in china. and there are huge pressure on building infrastructure r. yes, that is true and, but that's usually being driven by a large scale investments. i, i am a chairman of a renewable power company. we cannot keep up with the demand and in the data centers calling my company saying, we need power tomorrow. we can know if there is some of most the wind farm or us, all right, form. so i mean the have to start using fossil fuel to meet briefly, adrian. all we heading towards the a why the gap between the haves and have not countries? is that the reality? yes. so that's the story of this century. and as it was the last century,

as the point has been fairly eloquently made, you are going to have countries which produce their own energy at the moment on mass. they are fine for energy by and large, the middle east, russian us, north america, one or 2 other areas you've been going to have a whole lot of wealthy industrialized countries in europe, for example, parts of age which are going to be able to afford to buy energy almost at whatever cost and develop some of their own renewables. and then you're going to have the global side, which is just going to have to try and figure it out and pick up the pieces sasha, what does this mean then for the green transition and all of the environment goals, is it being on the mind via i and we're just not aware of it or talking about it. i think this is a broader representation of the digital divide that we've been seeing in a lot of areas of tech. and you know, a needs a lot of expensive gadget. it's expensive data centers and the gap is growing and

all of these promises that we made are these net 0 places that we made when it comes to investing and, and, and keeping up and, and making products. all the climate buttons tend to get overlooked in favor of the latest and greatest in a i. and so it's actually really hard to make those trade offs because of course, every business nowadays wants to have a chat bought or some fancy generate to the i tool and what impact that has on there. and that 0 and bushes. ambitions actually goes on unannounced and unnoticed . fins. the bottom line here is the basic starting point for setting up a better infrastructure for these don't the systems that policy may cuz need to provide the basic information without information. how did you, for example, when you were a minister, how on us could you calculate where you're heading? how could you plan for your energy needs? yeah, so it's a balance of between, you know,

reducing the impact of the carbon footprint of fossil fuel with introducing renewable power. but you also have the other side, which is you also want to bring in the young population into the digital world. so when we were doing the electrification of this done, the villages, i love to see that there are no online way to solve the light, fit a computer where they're learning using the cloud. so in a way, i like the, the fact that there's a big digitalization of the global south. now it's through a remote learning, but then it for stuff to it has to follow. and that's a constant balance between digital learning, renewable energy and infrastructure spending. always the files as a lot of see me will end on that know we'd like a balance thing to,

to our guest for making this such a great show. adrian white glove, vince pettus and saucer boots, jani, and thank you to, for watching. you can see the show again, any time by visiting our website. i'll do 0 dot com for further discussion and head over to our facebook page. that's facebook dot com, forward slash a j inside story. you can also join the conversation on x l a handle. there is that a guy inside story, from a sammy's a down in the whole team here for now. define the the

safe them even come in as an international inside corruption, excellence award, denominator here on. now, the thing, the why the western community will fully blind about the realities of most of them are of posting culture. there is still so much suspicion in the media and elsewhere in the wider community of error and voices. we do not have them nearly enough. it is much more acceptable to hear a so called moderate jewish voice. then i tell us the invoice, the

of the hello i'm for me to minute. this is the news. our line from the coming up in the next 60 minutes. america in this role must stand together is really prime minister benjamin. it's now 6 to balls to move you is support and is addressed to a joint meeting of congress. but she did type with the only by listing an american in congress protests and that's a now.