Energy demand – a new and voracious consumer enters the market – data servers for AI – switching Google search engine to ChatGPT would increase electricity usage by as much as used by Ireland!!!

By now the world knows that the current state of technology for wind turbines and solar panels make their use an expensive and ugly pipe dream for petulant children.

It would take covering a quarter to a third of the USA with plantations of wind farms (made up of 70-100 storey tall turbines) and millions of acres of eco-system solar panels just to replace the current energy needs of the US. The cost would run to trillions of dollars that the US, with its 35 trillion dollars of current federal debt – simply does not have.

In the meanwhile, the demand for electricity now has a new entrant.

The server market and AI.

No doubt the surveillance state will require a significant share of this energy.

Check this out:

Server Room Power Consumption: Demand and Efficiency (serverwatch.com)

“Server power consumption clocks in at a staggering 1,000 kWh per square meter, roughly ten times the energy consumption of a typical American household.”

A kWh costs around 14 cents, so each square meter of servers’ costs 140 bucks an hour!

Here’s a primer on server costs for small businesses:

How Much Does a Server Cost in 2024? (All Factors Explained) [Updated] (itsasap.com)

It’s not just the cost of a server, it is its running costs!

Big companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft are huge users of servers to process all their text, image and video traffic – now along comes AI.

How big is the server market?

Server Market Size, Share & Growth Analysis Report, 2030 (grandviewresearch.com)

“Server Market Size & Trends

The global server market size was estimated to be USD 89.26 billion in 2022 and is anticipated to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.3% from 2023 to 2030. The growth of the server industry can be attributed to smartphone proliferation increasing number of data centers, among others. The growing number of new data centers globally is one of the key factors expected to fuel market growth. Several cloud service providers and industries, such as IT and telecom, healthcare, BFSI, and government and defense, are engaged in upgrading their servers to manage the continuously rising volume of data.”

Basically – for the servers – not the electricity – the server market will double to 180 billion dollars by (the chicken little Net Zero climate year) of 2030.

As yu read this, imagine all the energy that is being consumed at the servers supporting all those cellphones and laptops of the chicken little “Gretas” around the world.

I wonder if any f these Gretas has written to Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs asking her why she vetoed a bill banning goods that use child and slave labour? You know, like all the green energy component manufacturers using children and slaves for mining lithiu and cobalt, for example.

Check out the server spending plans for Apple in 2021:

Apple to Spend $450B On Data Centers, Manufacturing, Offices in the US | Data Center Knowledge | News and analysis for the data center industry

Apple may be lagging behind in AI servers.

Apple AI server purchases could hit $5B over two years (appleinsider.com)

“Oct 2023 · With a price of around $250,000 per HGX H100 8-GPU server, it's estimated that Apple will spend around $620 million in 2023, and $4.75 billion in 2024 on AI servers alone.”

A little more for an AI server compared to a small business server for emails, payroll and web hosting!

“Writing on Medium, a survey by Kuo reveals Apple intends to purchase between 2,000 and 3,000 AI servers in 2023, and possibly between 18,000 and 20,000 servers in 2024. These figures are said to represent 1.3% and 5% of worldwide AI server shipments in their respective years.”

There’s a tiny clue on server numbers for 2023 and 2024 – around 200,000 servers globally in 2023 and double that this year. Just for AI.

Apple’s, Google’s and Microsoft’s power bills must be huge.

Here’s some more stuff just on the AI component.

The AI Boom Could Use a Shocking Amount of Electricity | Scientific American

“Every online interaction relies on a scaffolding of information stored in remote servers—and those machines, stacked together in data centers worldwide, require a lot of energy. Around the globe, data centers currently account for about 1 to 1.5 percent of global electricity use, according to the International Energy Agency. And the world’s still-exploding boom in artificial intelligence could drive that number up a lot—and fast.”

One to one and half per cent of all global energy now and forecast to double by 2030.

“A continuation of the current trends in AI capacity and adoption are set to lead to NVIDIA shipping 1.5 million AI server units per year by 2027. These 1.5 million servers, running at full capacity, would consume at least 85.4 terawatt-hours of electricity annually—more than what many small countries use in a year, according to the new assessment.”

Many thought NVidia was just a gaming platform!

As Alex de Vries, a data scientist at the central bank of the Netherlands and a Ph.D. candidate at Vrije University Amsterdam puts it.

“Because AI is energy-intensive. I put one example of this in my research article: I highlighted that if you were to fully turn Google’s search engine into something like ChatGPT, and everyone used it that way—so you would have nine billion chatbot interactions instead of nine billion regular searches per day—then the energy use of Google would spike. Google would need as much power as Ireland just to run its search engine.”

It’s not just the cost to Big Tech as it expands the functionality of platforms into AI space. That power has to come from somewhere.

Green energy cannot supply mor than a quarter of current demand.

Surveillance states breaking out across the planet to support the totalitarian measures of the psychopaths seeking to run the world will increase exponentially – power given to these egomaniacs will come with a huge bill.

Then there will be a dilemma for ordinary consumers. What if the “servers” get priority over households because there just isn’t enough power to supply both? Is this ushering in rationing of power so that the severs (of the surveillance state) can run 24 x 7?

I wonder how much transparency there will be around pricing for server farms v pricing for households – or will households have to pay double or triple for their electricity.

Here’s some stuff on data centres that host server farms in the US.

United States Data Centers: Top 10 Locations in the USA - Dgtl Infra

Onwards!!!

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