He’s just plain wrong about the electricity usage going up because of AI compute.
To a first approximation, the amount of silicon wafers going through fabs globally is constant. We won’t suddenly increase chip manufacturing a hundredfold! There aren’t enough fabs or “tools” like the ASML EUV machines for that.
Electricity is used for lots of things, not just compute, and within compute the AI fraction is tiny. We’re ramping up a rounding error to a slightly larger rounding error.
What will increase is global energy demand for overall economic activity as manufacturing and industry is accelerated by AIs.
Anyone who’s played games like Factorio would know intuitively that the only two real inputs to the economy are raw materials and energy. Increases to manufacturing speed need matching increases to energy supply!
To a first approximation, the amount of silicon wafers going through fabs globally is constant. We won’t suddenly increase chip manufacturing a hundredfold! There aren’t enough fabs or “tools” like the ASML EUV machines for that.
Electricity is used for lots of things, not just compute, and within compute the AI fraction is tiny. We’re ramping up a rounding error to a slightly larger rounding error.
What will increase is global energy demand for overall economic activity as manufacturing and industry is accelerated by AIs.
Anyone who’s played games like Factorio would know intuitively that the only two real inputs to the economy are raw materials and energy. Increases to manufacturing speed need matching increases to energy supply!