Apollo Says AI Energy Gap 'Will Not Be Closed in Our Lifetime' (bloomberg.com)
- Reference: 0179858214
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/10/23/184238/apollo-says-ai-energy-gap-will-not-be-closed-in-our-lifetime
- Source link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-22/apollo-says-ai-energy-gap-will-not-be-closed-in-our-lifetime
> "The gap between what AI is demanding and what we have everywhere in the world on the grid in terms of generation and transmission is huge and will not be closed in our lifetime," Dave Stangis, who has led and developed Apollo's sustainability strategy over the past four years, said in an interview.
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> That means sustainable energy investors need to accept that renewables alone aren't enough to power the AI age, he said. The comments encapsulate a new approach across the finance industry, where the economics of the energy transition -- a concept intended to represent the shift to a low-carbon future -- are becoming merged with the economics of an unprecedented boost in supply. "So what is happening around the world, there's no doubt about it, is what you might call energy addition," Stangis said. "The world is scrambling to add every source of power."
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-22/apollo-says-ai-energy-gap-will-not-be-closed-in-our-lifetime
Who or what is (Score:2)
Apollo Global?
Re: (Score:2)
Oh you know just your run of the mill asset management firm controlling $840,000,000,000 in wealth and assets. American as apple pie.
The predictions may be nonsense (Score:4, Interesting)
AI made rapid progress by increasing processing power and data.
This lead some to extrapolate that future AI will need astronomical amounts of power.
Meanwhile, researchers are working on improved algorithms or completely different approaches.
Brains take a tiny amount of power to work. Current AI is very inefficient.
I predict that new architectures/chips/algorithms will dramatically reduce the power necessary.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, some restraint all round is in order. And that goes for personal activities like jet-setting too.
Re: (Score:2)
And cryptocurrencies. What a colossal waste of energy. Our current currency system is sufficient. Ban crypto mining to save the energy for more useful purposes.
let's hope it's not closed at all (Score:3)
"That means sustainable energy investors need to accept that renewables alone aren't enough to power the AI age, he said."
I means that the "AI age" needs to accept it too. What is taken for granted here, and shouldn't be, is that AI computing is entitled to unlimited power, it is not.
'"So what is happening around the world, there's no doubt about it, is what you might call energy addition," Stangis said. "The world is scrambling to add every source of power."'
And this is a huge mistake. Mankind does not need this and will suffer because of it. This is an indulgence motivated by billionaire greed, society should not only NOT provide this energy, it should make this massive threat to the planet illegal.
AI is designed to allow wealth to access skill (Score:3)
Without skill accessing wealth.
So given that yeah, AI can have all the energy in the world. With a little bit set aside for the ultra wealthy to enjoy.
It is genuinely bizarre that that people cannot wrap their heads around the idea that there is no place for them in the glorious future that our billionaire and trillionaire overlords are planning.
I think the problem is that it's already hard for people to imagine capitalism going away let alone capitalism going away not because communism or socia
Prediction: (Score:4, Informative)
40 years ago people swore up and down local PCs would never be fast enough for everyday tasks and we'd need to connect to central terminals to process it all.
20 years ago people swore up and down the only way to save money was to move storage from local to a central terminals to save it all.
10 years ago people swore up and down the only way to get high end video games playable on a high end device was to move it all to a central terminal.
Today your phone has more processing power than the supercomputer of the 80's, cloud storage for individuals is a scam and cloud "products" used to ensure individuals don't own any product, IT departments are going back to building their own servers as cloud providers jack up profits; and the Nintendo Switch came out less than 2 years after execs started swearing up and down "cloud gaming" was the inevitable future.
Someone's going to optimize large language models to run fast and have individuals parts sparsely loaded off an SSD, if you want an LLM to write your resume or do your English homework for you it'll run locally on your laptop soon enough, and all these AI centers will be trillions of dollars worth of garbage.
Moore's law I would like to have a word with you (Score:3)
As would physics.
The more that llms get optimized the more is expected from them. The more things that they can automate.
This isn't something I think that really smart people are going to technology our way out of. Honestly I don't see a solution. I've said it before but I think we're going to see mass unemployment leading into world wars and then eventually nuclear wars ending our species.
I think that the inability to deal with the combined threats of technological unemployment in civilizations
Re: (Score:2)
And yet the demand for more power has never gone away. It keeps increasing. The more computers can do, the more people ask of them. However powerful they get, people will always want more so they can do even more.
Increasing efficiency won't solve this problem. Right now, the economic imperative is to build bigger companies running bigger models on bigger data centers. Bigger than what? Bigger than their competitors, of course. Everything else is secondary, including whether they destroy the planet in
The gap will be closed (Score:3)
... when the AI bubble bursts and 90% of the AI data centers go dark. The AI that remains will be the AI that is doing something useful enough to be worth the electricity it sucks down.
Surprised? (Score:2)
Knowledge is power, and AI is pushed to be infinitely knowledgeable. It’s like asking a black hole if it’s had enough by throwing more money in.
We have 8 billion real intelligences (Score:2)
That only use a small amount of energy a day, lets use them instead.
Re: We have 8 billion real intelligences (Score:2)
We have eight billion batteries I think you mean!
On currents of stolen light .. (Score:2)
Western society, in its death throes, hurled itself headfirst into the mad scramble for technological transcendence. Ravenous AI corporate god like machines, gnawed at the bones of the electric grid, demanding a monstrous two-thirds expansion of power capacity, a grotesque swelling of arteries to feed their insatiable hunger.
This wasn’t progress; it was a fever dream fueled by the singularity cult. A blinding, fanatical conviction that silicon would outthink flesh, that code would unmake soul, rewr
It will - when AI bubble bursts... (Score:2)
The demand is due to obscene amount of money being invested in AI.
But the return on this investment might not be that high.
This will burst the bubble and lower the energy demand.
Computing not AI, Time shift it. (Score:2)
The quite truth of the matter is the power curve did not change when AI become popular - it was already skyrocketing.
Computers have been using more and more power for a very long time, AI is merely the current buzzword we use for wanting more computing done.
But more importantly, what AI we do have can easily be time shifted. The AI corporations should scatter their processors around the world. Do not send all your processing to one AI cluster in the middle of your country. Instead have a simple routing m
At what point will they admit it's just stupid? (Score:2)
If you were watering everyone's lawn, even those that don't want it, and constantly demanding bigger pipes so you could increase watering those lawns on a daily basis - at what point would people say JUST STOP wasting all the water.
This how AI is treating both the electric grid and the environment. People need to wake up.
At some point nuclear fission will look cheap. (Score:1)
Finally a news article on energy shortages where nuclear fission gets a favorable mention.
This problem of energy production is only going to get worse until the bullshit arguments against nuclear power are proven undeniably false and we start to see new nuclear power plants get built. The first argument that will likely fall is that nuclear power costs too much. Simple supply and demand will dictate that as demand rises and supply fails to meet it then prices will rise until that price increase discourage
scale (Score:2)
Tell me again how AI scales.
why not use some of the waste heat? (Score:2)
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone trying to use the waste heat that all this computer power is generating? I realize that would impact cooling a little, but surely SOME of this can be recovered efficiently? Steam turbines are the usual way to turn heat into electrical power. Is there no way to do it for data centers?
For example, use a heat pump to concentrate the heat to above boiling temperature then use that to boil water to run a steam turbine. The heat pump would require some power to run, but I t
Re: (Score:2)
> I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone trying to use the waste heat that all this computer power is generating?
Some data centers have used their waste heat to do things like heat pools, or apartments/condos.
Re:why not use some of the waste heat? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because that would require the expensive infrastructure spending and why would they bother doing that when they can just take your electricity away from you?
I don't think people have realized that AI isn't for us. It's not a product. It's what the top 6,000 people on earth are going to use as an answer to the question "well if they fire all of us who's going to buy their products?"
The problem seems to be that people cannot comprehend capitalism going away except maybe by Star Trek style utopian socialism.
What if there was a third option?
What if we could have something like it was during the monarchy before the rise of merchants? Something along the lines of a feudal system.
You would have knights to enforce the king's will and you would have a handful of artisans to make the things the Kings wanted.
In modern terms that would be a handful of engineers to keep the automation going and a handful of thugs to keep the engineers in line. Mix in a little bit of religious extremism to keep the thugs and maybe occasionally the engineers in line.
It's a post capitalist world but not one with a place for you in it. And it's what every single billionaire is chomping at the bit to get.
It's not as if they haven't noticed they are dependent on consumers. What makes you think they haven't? And what makes you think they like that situation? They think about as the filthiest creatures imaginable. The sooner they break that dependency the happier they will be.
It remains to be seen if they are successful, but it's definitely what they are up to and honestly I've been watching them work towards this goal for 50 years now and they aren't far from it. Not just technologically but socially.