Tech giants rush to secure energy for AI datacentres

However, he said nothing about the energy this would require. AI may be getting smarter, but it is also power-hungry and thirsty for water resources.

The planned closure of some coal-fired plants in the US has been delayed to help meet demand.

While AI is already revolutionising healthcare and transforming workplaces, it has blown a hole in the tech giants’ plans to cut carbon emissions. They are now racing to secure clean energy sources.

Deals include Google’s $3bn (£2.2bn) agreement to modernise two hydropower plants in Pennsylvania, Meta’s 20-year deal with a nuclear plant in Illinois and Microsoft’s project to reopen a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania – the site in March 1979 of the most serious nuclear meltdown in US history.

A US energy department report published this month warned that the risk of power outages would increase 100 times by 2030 unless fossil fuel plants due to be shut were kept on the grid to help power AI.

Meanwhile, research by the International Energy Agency has projected that electricity demand from datacentres is set to double by 2030 to slightly more than the entire electricity consumption of Japan.

But there are no requirements for tech companies to disclose the resources used by AI and there is a big variation in estimates. A typical ChatGPT query uses 0.34 watt-hours of electricity – about what an oven would use in a little over a second and about one 15th of a teaspoon of water, according to its developer, OpenAI.

In some cases, the tech companies’ consumption is already causing trouble locally. Investigations by news website OregonLive found Google’s datacentres were consuming 355m gallons of water in the city of Dalles in just one year – equivalent to 29% of the water supply. More recently, one of Meta’s datacentres in Newton County, Georgia, provoked the ire of people living 300 metres away, who suspected it was to blame for water shortages in the area.

Photography by Jason Alden/Bloomberg via Getty