According to The New Yorker, popular chatbots ChatGPT More than 200 million requests need to be processed every day, and its power consumption may be as high as 500,000 kWh per day. In comparison, the average daily electricity consumption of an average American household is only 29 kWh, which means that ChatGPT's daily electricity consumption is more than 17,000 times that of an average household.
What is more worrying is that withGenerative AIAs the popularity of generative AI grows, its electricity consumption could surge further. Alex de Vries, a data scientist at the Dutch Central Bank, calculated in a paper published in the sustainable energy journal Joule that if Google applied generative AI technology to all searches, it would consume about 29 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, which is equivalent to the total annual electricity generation of Kenya, Guatemala and Croatia.
However, it is difficult to assess how much electricity the booming AI industry actually consumes. According to The Verge, large technology companies have been leading the development of AI, but they are very secretive about their energy consumption, and there are huge differences in how different artificial intelligence models operate.
However, de Vries still made a rough calculation in the paper based on the figures released by Nvidia. According to CNBC, citing data from New Street Research, Nvidia has a market share of about 95% in graphics processors. In the paper, de Vries estimated that by 2027, the entire AI industry will consume 85 to 134 terawatt hours (IT Home Note: terawatt, equivalent to 134 billion kilowatt hours) of electricity per year.
“That equates to AI potentially accounting for about half of all electricity consumed by the world by 2027,” de Vries tells The Verge. “I think that’s a pretty significant number.”
That dwarfs some of the world's biggest power consumers: Samsung uses nearly 23 terawatt hours a year, while tech giants like Google use just over 12 terawatt hours a year for their data centers, networks and user devices, and Microsoft uses just over 10 terawatt hours, according to Businessinsider calculations based on reports from Consumer Energy Solutions.