Energy Costs Will Decide Which Countries Win the AI Race, Microsoft's Nadella Says (cnbc.com)
- Reference: 0180620086
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/01/20/1529245/energy-costs-will-decide-which-countries-win-the-ai-race-microsofts-nadella-says
- Source link: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/20/microsoft-nadella-ai-race-energy-tokens.html
> As countries race to build AI infrastructure to capitalize on the technology's promise of huge efficiency gains, Nadella told the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Tuesday that "GDP growth in any place will be directly correlated" to the cost of energy in using AI.
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> He pointed to a new global commodity in "tokens" -- basic units of processing that are bought by users of AI models, allowing them to run tasks. "The job of every economy and every firm in the economy is to translate these tokens into economic growth, then if you have a cheaper commodity, it's better."
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> "I would say we will quickly lose even the social permission to actually take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens, if these tokens are not improving health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private sector competitiveness across all sectors," Nadella said.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/20/microsoft-nadella-ai-race-energy-tokens.html
In other words (Score:3)
"It will be better for you if you don't resist."
Re: (Score:1)
Greenland has a population of about 50,000 and no nukes. China has a population of about 1,500,000,000 and a few hundred nukes.
So letting China win the "AI race" and then stealing their country probably won't work.
AI doesn't put food on the table (Score:5, Insightful)
AI is irrelevant. It will not feed you. It will not make your life easier. And it will not make most of us rich.
Re: (Score:2)
If that's all you care about, you have a limited view.
AI has the potential to help is solve previously intractable problems in science, engineering, medicine and maybe even politics.
It's not all slop.
Unfortunately, there is so much slop that much of the general public believes that's all there is.
Only with the current model (Score:2)
Sure, given the current land grab, brute force is being used to "win" and demanding unsustainable demands on power generation. The real winner is going to be the country/company that figures out how to get an "AI" solution that works reasonably well while finding a significantly more power efficient solution to the problem.
What's the over/under bet on when there's an efficiency inflection point and there are suddenly thousands (tens of thousands?) of expensive datacenters that are no longer needed?
Translation (Score:3)
We want our energy to be paid for by the people we are going to send to the unemployment line, not ourselves.
Re: (Score:2)
This! I wish to have more kudos to upvote you.
Gonna be a long cold winter... (Score:2)
No, Nadella, when the AI firms have thrown away all their investment cash chasing the LLM IQ asymptote, energy costs will determine how many light bulbs the founders can sit around to keep warm.
Wrong focus (Score:2)
AI is too important to be controlled by the winner of a "race"
It needs to be available to all
What is the finish line, again? (Score:2)
It's a race. What's the finish line? What happens when some company wins 1st place? What happens when the 2nd place finisher crosses the line?
America "won" the space race and yet at least 4 countries have landed on the moon, made space stations, etc. Nobody but historians really care about the winner of that one nowadays.
Re: (Score:2)
The USA only "won" the space race if you arbitrarily define winning in terms of something they did first, like a manned moon landing, moon sample return, or successful Mars lander. USSR "won" in terms of first artificial satellite, first man in space, first manned orbit, first woman in space, first EVA, first long-term manned space station, first successful Venus lander, etc. Treating it as a "race" at all was just a dick waving contest.
So why not invest in cheap renewables? (Score:2)
This points to the stupidity of these AI companies.
Instead on installing the cheapest form of energy (solar, wind, batteries), they are doing stupid things like opening coal, gas, and nuclear plants.
Or... are they just looking for subsidies from the government taxpayers and ratepayers?
Energy - Trump's oil and gas then? (Score:2)
We find ourselves up shit creek without a paddle. Once again we have to ask how did we get Trump? Just maybe it is the thing Davos WEF is not talking about:
> This week, hundreds of government leaders, heads of state, and business executives are gathering at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos. They will be discussing solutions to the world’s biggest risks and problems. But everything suggests that, once more, what will not be addressed at their meeting is the biggest threat to
There is no winning here (Score:2)
AI exists to replace paying wages. Any country that implements this technology is going to see massive unemployment and with it enormous amounts of economic and social instability.
This only exists to benefit about 3,000 people on the planet who are sick and fucking tired of paying you and having to suck up to consumers in order to make sales and get the money they want.
It's the most bizarre way for capitalism to end. Just going back to feudal Kings only without the peasantry.
There will still be
Correction (Score:2)
Energy efficiency will be the determining factor* of who wins. Chinese AI requires fewer energy tokens per processing token. China wins.
*Capital efficiency comes in second. China still wins.
the (Score:2)
they're hoarding the RAM and GPUs and storage now, in a few more years they're hogging the electricity and the water
Bold take (Score:4, Insightful)
Energy is the ultimate bottleneck for most industries.
Re: (Score:1)
And we've spent decades deliberately making energy more expensive because we're scared of plant food.
Ooops.
Re: (Score:2)
And is there an AI race? It's more like a playground for grown-ups, my orange spade is better than your blue spade.