Bill Gates on AI's Energy Impact and Future Outlook
TapTechNews June 28th news, according to the Financial Times' report today Beijing time, in response to the problem of the current AI system leading to accelerated energy consumption, Bill Gates launched a defense, believing that the AI technology will eventually offset its power consumption.
When giving a speech in London, Bill Gates appealed to environmentalists and governments not to be unduly worried about the huge amount of electricity required to run the new generation of AI systems, because large tech companies such as Microsoft are competing to invest billions of dollars to build large new data centers.
He said that data centers will increase the global electricity consumption by 2-6%. And in May this year, Microsoft admitted that since 2020, its greenhouse gas emissions increased by nearly one-third, largely due to the construction of data centers. But at the same time, tech companies will pay a green premium for clean energy when seeking new energy sources, which will help promote the development and deployment of clean energy.
Bill Gates said: Tech companies are willing to pay the premium and help start green energy capacity. It is known that Gates participated in the Breakthrough Energy (BreakthroughEnergyGroup) summit this time.
TapTechNews note: The Breakthrough Energy group was founded by Gates and has received investments from Jeff Bezos, Masayoshi Son and Jack Ma. The group has invested in more than 100 companies developing sustainable energy and other technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Large tech groups such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google have made plans to spend billions of dollars to build the computing infrastructure required to run AI systems in various countries around the world, but power supply limitations have brought new challenges to these ambitious companies.
In May this year, the US non-profit organization Electric Power Research Institute pointed out that by 2030, data centers may consume 9% of the US power generation, more than twice the current usage.