“We do not yet fully understand the energy requirements of this technology. » This warning about artificial intelligence (AI) is not uttered by an environmental activist but by a star of the sector, the founder of OpenAI himself, Sam Altman. Held on January 16 on the sidelines of the Davos summit in Switzerland, the words of the father of the ChatGPT conversational robot are not isolated.
Electricity consumed by digital data centers around the world is expected to double by 2026, mainly due to the rise of AI and cryptocurrencies, according to a report published on January 24 by the International Energy Agency. This need could increase from 460 TWh in 2022, or 2% of global demand (including 25% for cryptocurrencies), to 1,050 TWh, a jump equivalent to the consumption of an additional country, of the order of that of Germany.
American data centers could triple their consumption by 2030, to 390 TWh, according to the Boston Consulting Group, quoted by Bloomberg.
A data center provider that doubled its electricity consumption every five years could soon double it every year, with the gradual arrival of supercomputers housing very powerful graphics cards, intended for training or user requests of the models. AI and services like ChatGPT, explains an industry executive. A cabinet of supercomputers would consume around five times more than a normal server. Still very much in the minority, these specialized cards are the subject of a race: Meta (Facebook, Instagram) plans to have 350,000 state-of-the-art cards from leader Nvidia by the end of 2024.
The explosion in demand for electricity linked to AI is already having local consequences: in the United States, it is generating tensions on new data center projects in the “Data Center Alley” of northern Virginia. In the Kansas City region, it pushed an energy supplier to postpone the closure date of a coal-fired power plant, Bloomberg reports.
A dangerous bet
In France, known for its nuclear electricity classified as carbon-free, the municipal council of Marseille, at the end of October, voted for a deliberation on the place of data centers, while the elected environmentalist Sébastien Barles called for a “moratorium”. Marseille has five centers and eleven projects, due to the sixteen submarine Internet traffic cables connected to the port, recalled, at the end of 2023, The world. Other network hubs, Amsterdam, London and Dublin have also sparked debates around moratoriums on new centers. In France, voluntary load shedding in the event of a local consumption peak is already planned.
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