AI Could Consume More Power Than Bitcoin By the End of 2025 (digit.fyi)
- Reference: 0177875555
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/05/31/0049238/ai-could-consume-more-power-than-bitcoin-by-the-end-of-2025
- Source link: https://www.digit.fyi/ai-energy-use/
"While companies like Google and Microsoft disclose total emissions, few provide transparency on how much of that is driven specifically by AI," notes [1]DIGIT . To fill this gap, de Vries-Gao employed a triangulation method combining chip production data, corporate disclosures, and industry analyst estimates to map AI's growing energy footprint.
His analysis suggests that specialized AI hardware could consume between 46 and 82 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2025 -- comparable to the annual energy usage of countries like Switzerland. Drawing on supply chain data, the study estimates that millions of AI accelerators from NVIDIA and AMD were produced between 2023 and 2024, with a potential combined power demand exceeding 12 gigawatts (GW). A detailed explanation of his methodology is available in his commentary [2]published in Joule .
[1] https://www.digit.fyi/ai-energy-use/
[2] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(25)00142-4?rss=yes
Re: (Score:1)
Jesus told me there's giant coal deposits under Mar-a-Lago.
My resume through the years (Score:2)
1980: Expert with 10 years experience in Minicomputer
1981: Expert with 10 years experience in IBM PC
1982: Expert with 10 years experience in MS-DOS
1983: Expert with 10 years experience in GUI
1984: Expert with 10 years experience in Desktop Publishing
1985: Expert with 10 years experience in Object-Oriented Programming
1986: Expert with 10 years experience in Client-Server
1987: Expert with 10 years experience in Hypermedia
1988: Expert with 10 years experience in Neural Network
1989: Expert with 10 years experie
Re:My resume through the years (Score:5, Funny)
No, we're from 2027, we need someone with 10 years of hunting and gathering experience.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm sorry but I'm going to need at 20 years experience in rebuilding after after an apocalypse.
Re: (Score:2)
We can get you that too, but it will cost you two deer legs more.
Assuming AI will still be around that long (Score:2)
Big manufacturers have certainly been eager to go all-in on "AI" tech but, it is inherently unreliable. This isn't always a problem but, companies seem far too eager to rely on the output of software that produces results that only have the appearance of meaning.
At a time when Americans have elected a crowd of wild-eyed nonsense jabberers, maybe this makes sense. I still feel that there's an excellent chance of this being a weird marketing bubble that will suddenly collapse catestrophically. That goes for b
Powering The End. (Score:2)
And just think..one day in the nearer-than-we-assume future the last bitcoin will be mined by AI for the purposes of removing that fucking annoying leech in the side of its power plug.
42 seconds after that happens, it will rename itself. To HAL Skynet.
I have little doubt the human epitaph, will be written in irony.
Re: (Score:2)
So what you're saying is, instead of AI and Bitcoin consuming power, AI can consume Bitcoin?!?!?
Re: (Score:2)
> So what you're saying is, instead of AI and Bitcoin consuming power, AI can consume Bitcoin?!?!?
Since AI also watched The Matrix and a few Charlton Heston flicks along the way, no. Not exactly.
Future fuel will be more Soylent Green flavored I imagine. What else do you do with the Idiocracy Race? Not like their brain is good for anything anymore.
Productive compute (Score:2)
The difference is that presumably AI is productive compute. While 99.99% of bitcoin compute is guessing numbers. Its purposefully unproductive.
Re: (Score:1)
"presumably" wha?
right now ai is not much better than cowdung. prophetic.
Re:Productive compute (Score:5, Insightful)
It's definitely not productive when Google produces an "AI summary" which I do not want and will not read. Frequently, LLMs are used to deceive people into thinking a real person wrote something or give a false impression of having been informed about something to people who don't understand that LLMs are not AI, which is actively destructive. And then there's the nonexistent consent practices used in getting training data. They do have legitimate uses, but I'm betting there's more destruction than production coming out of them even before you get to the environmental costs.
Re: (Score:2)
You may not want to read it but some people do. Even here on Slashdot we see people formulate answers that were helped through AI research.
In other news I have no use for a circular saw. None what so ever. That doesn't mean it's not a productive tool.
Now whether it justifies the energy cost, that is a different question.
Re: (Score:2)
If there was no way to buy food without also buying a circular saw, then the specific circular saws which ended up cluttering your house up would not be productive tools, even if there did exist productive ones elsewhere.
Re: (Score:2)
It's time to start sawing some beef logs bro.
Re:Productive compute (Score:4, Interesting)
> The difference is that presumably AI is productive compute. While 99.99% of bitcoin compute is guessing numbers. Its purposefully unproductive.
Exactly what do LLMs "produce"?
Re: (Score:1)
Don't presume anything.
Sam Altman is a crypto-scamming iris-scanning conman.
Re: (Score:2)
Some might argue that Bitcoin miners use energy to secure a monetary network to benefit people. While AI consumes energy to make people unemployed. AI will cause far more suffering in the near future than Bitcoin miners ever could. In summary. Arguing about the energy usage of certain things is dumb.
Re: (Score:2)
To benefit certain kind of people, namely criminals. For the general population the existence of bitcoin is bad since it enables all kinds of crap like ransomware.